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Gary Edwards

What is the difference between an equity seed round and a convertible debt round? - Quora - 0 views

www.quora.com/d-and-a-convertible-debt-round

vc investor

shared by Gary Edwards on 07 Oct 16 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 07 Oct 16
     
    "A startup that needs a small amont of cash (usually under $1.5-$2m or so) will find two typical structures to consider: a "priced round", where the investor and the company agree on the purchase of a certain amount of equity in the company for a given amount of cash.  The investor has a known fixed percentage of the company they own when the financing has closed. a convertible note, in which the investor gives cash in exchange for a discount on the next round of funding (which will typically be a priced round).  In this case, the investor does not know what % of the company their cash will eventually have bought and, consequently, the entrepreneur doesn't know how much dilution has occurred. There are advantages to each, but to start with, it's worth pointing out that you will rarely see convertibles used in seed financing for amounts greater than $1m or $1.5m.  (exceptions do exist).  Above that range, the investor typically wants to know what percent he or she owns of the company, so a priced round is far more common. Here's an attempt at a simple explanation of a convertible-note financing and why it is used:  If the concept is new and it proves challenging to agree on what the value of this company could be, a convertible is sometimes an easy way of the two parties saying "we're just not sure how to value the company yet until we see some traction or release the product, so let's set aside valuation until we get further down the road."  The investor gives cash, and in exchange gets a note (debt) from the company to pay back the amount (plus interest) or convert it to stock in a later round (usually the next financing).  Of course the seed investor is betting early and is therefore putting their money in with greater risk, so to offset that risk, they negotiate a discount rate on what their money will ultimately buy at the next round.  If the convertible note holder invested $500k in a convertible note, assuming the company wasn't able to pay off the n
Gary Edwards

Microsoft raises prices of Office one-time licenses 5% to 7% | CIO - 0 views

www.cio.com/...-one-time-licenses-5-to-7.html

Office-365

shared by Gary Edwards on 26 Sep 15 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 26 Sep 15
     
    "Microsoft today launched Office 2016 for Windows, and simultaneously raised prices of the stand-alone licenses for both it and the Mac edition between 5% and 7%. Office 365 subscription prices -- the "rent-not-own" model that Microsoft's been aggressively pushing since early 2013 -- did not change. resume makeover executive IT Resume Makeover: How to add flavor to a bland resume Don't count on your 'plain vanilla' resume to get you noticed - your resume needs a personal flavor to Read Now The cost of a single-license Office Home & Student 2016 edition climbed $10, from $140 to $150, a 7.1% increase. Meanwhile, Office Home & Business 2016 -- which adds Microsoft's Outlook email client to the suite -- also rose $10, from $220 to $230, or 4.5%. Office Professional 2016, available only for Windows, retained its $400 price tag. The single-license, stand-alone editions are sold primarily at retail, and are dubbed "perpetual" licenses because they require a one-time payment, but can then be used as long as the user wants. That's in contrast to Office 365, which requires a monthly or annual fee to continue using the software. On the consumer side, customers can choose between Office 365 Personal ($70 annually, $7 monthly) and Office 365 Home ($100 per year, $10 each month), while businesses have options that range from $99 to $240 per user per year. Office 365 Home is notable because it allows up to five installations of Office 2016 on PCs or Macs in the same household. All Office 365 plans, both consumer- and business-grade, also include rights to run the Office apps designed for Android, iOS and Windows 10 touch-centric mobile devices, including Android smartphones and tablets, iPhones and iPads, and Windows 10 touch-enabled tablets and notebooks. Microsoft's price increase for Office 2016 perpetual licenses was the second since January 2013, when the company revamped its retail line-up and boosted prices by as much as 17%. Microsoft duplicated those price increa
Gary Edwards

Nearline - Data Archiving, Backup & Disaster Recovery  |  Google Cloud Platform - 0 views

cloud.google.com/storage-nearline

Sync-Share-Store Google

shared by Gary Edwards on 20 Dec 16 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 20 Dec 16
     
    "Highly Available Cold Storage A low-cost, highly-durable and highly available storage service for infrequently accessed data, data archiving, online backup and disaster recovery. Data is available instantly, not within hours or days. With sub-second average response times and 1 cent per GB/month pricing, Cloud Storage Nearline gives you terrific performance at a low cost. Fast, Anytime Access With Cloud Storage Nearline, you get all the benefits of cold storage while your data is immediately available. Store limitless data and get access rapidly through Google Cloud Platform Storage APIs with sub-second response times for data retrieval and 99% availability SLA. Affordable pricing Cloud Storage Nearline provides the TCO benefits usually associated with offline storage, so you can easily backup and store a virtually limitless amount of data. Capacity pricing is just 1 cent per GB/month for data at rest and 1 cent per GB for data retrieval. Switch & Save Get a headstart and reduce the costs of your migration to Google Cloud Storage Nearline by receiving 100PB of free storage1 in Cloud Storage Nearline for up to 6 months. Partnerships & Integrations Leading disaster recovery, backup and hybrid cloud storage providers such as Unitrends, Actifio, Pixit Media, EMC, Commvault and Egnyte have integrated with Cloud Storage Nearline to make adopting Cloud Storage Nearline a seamless experience. Numerous other companies are also available to help you take a new approach to data storage in your own environment."
Gary Edwards

The Real Power of Platforms Is Helping People Self-Organize - 0 views

hbr.org/...s-helping-people-self-organize

Uber

shared by Gary Edwards on 25 Apr 16 - No Cached
  • It’s also interesting to note that Uber doesn’t expect exclusivity from its extended labor force. Many people who drive for Uber also drive for competing services like Lyft. That lifts a key constraint — namely that the company must optimize a fixed amount of a worker’s time. Drivers opt-in to drive the schedules that work best for them — maybe the free time they have between dropping kids off at school and then picking them up. For others, they may opt to work 12-hour-long days. There is no central actor setting the rules such as having to manage artificial constraints like a fixed eight-hour workday. Nothing is pre-planned and everything is left to the market to come up with efficient solutions.
  • they focus on creating a market where people with cars can connect with people who need rides.
  • How does Uber handle the holiday crunch? They let the market solve that issue through surge pricing. At peak times, prices rise — which reduces demand AND increases supply of drivers. Sure, some folks consider this price gouging at times. But it’s interesting to see how the higher fares create incentives for more drivers to hit the roads to meet that demand. Problem solved, again without any preplanning.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • It so happens that open source software works very similarly to Uber in terms of stoking active participation beyond any one company’s boundaries. Contributors choose to participate on a project. They may have a job or be in school. Regardless of what they do, they voluntarily opt in to a system, which self-organizes based on the need at hand. As with Uber, there is no preplanning of resources or scheduled shifts; everything is self-organized by volunteers interested in tackling that job at that time.
  • If these participative systems can solve complex optimization problems without central planning, like managing Uber’s logistics or developing the open source Linux kernel, what else can they do? Traditional institutions as we know them today will not exist in their current forms in twenty years. The boundaries of the traditional corporation are becoming more and more porous as the value of centralized planning and coordination declines. That’s a truly disruptive development and something that every organization, regardless of industry, should be paying attention to.
  • Gary Edwards on 25 Apr 16
     
    "Uber, the car-sharing service, has become ubiquitous. It's now a multi-billion-dollar global business. It's even become a noun of sorts - uberization - which people use to describe a disruptive change to a staid industry ripe for innovation (though, to be sure, the popularization of the word "disruptive" means that it is often used in ways that the concept's author, Clay Christensen, didn't intend). But I would argue that the real reason Uber is disruptive is because it is reshaping how we can think about organizing people, not cars. Uber has shown how you can actually empower many thousands of people to self-organize to tackle a task (shuffling people to their destination in this case) without the preplanning that is the norm in traditional enterprises. Put another way, Uber's business model extends a very complex supply chain beyond the boundaries of a corporation in a way that creates real results without any planning in advance. That is a remarkable example of how technology will reshape how we organize to get work done at scale in the future. For context, I worked at Delta Air Lines for many years before I joined Red Hat, the open source software provider where I am now CEO. When I was at Delta, we spent enormous resources in terms of time and money on planning. Airline operations are a huge optimization challenge. There are hundreds of planes, thousands of pilots, flight attendants, mechanics, and ground crews that must be properly deployed for the system to work efficiently. We needed to process reams of data using expensive and sophisticated software and computers to predict demand, know the capabilities of each aircraft type, and to understand each work group's constraints. We also had an army of PhD-caliber people whose full-time jobs involved figuring out this puzzle in a way that we could still make money. Uber's value chain has a similar optimization challenge - it needs to deal with variable demand, thousands of drivers,
Gary Edwards

MS Office 365 and its Influence on Business - 0 views

microsoft.cioreview.com/...business-nid-12911-cid-50.html

Office-365

shared by Gary Edwards on 04 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • “MS Office has virtually no rivals with its volume of functionality and compatibility of the document formats”
  • Office 365: what is going on at the market? Offline version of MS Office has actually not many competitors with the comparable functionality. LibreOffice, OpenOffice, CorelOffice etc. may be referred among them. But if you examine the cross-platform solutions for the offline document editing, MS Office has virtually no rivals with its volume of functionality and compatibility of the document formats.
  • Costs of the full-fledged package MS Office 365 (including its cloud-based capacities) and the offline version of MS Office 2013/2016 for the home users are comparable. Therefore the progressive transition of the majority of users to MS Office 365 may be forecasted.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Currently the primary market spreading the MS Office 365 services is the corporate sector. However soon, due to the flexible pricing policy of Microsoft, new home users will progressively give their preference to MS Office 365. Rise of popularity of the off-the-shelf Microsoft solutions in the corporate sector, especially in the midst of the small and mid-sized business, is also expected. Integration of MS Office 365 with SharePoint Online, Exchange Online, Skype, OneDrive, PowerBIand Lync Online allows the full-scaled employment of the MS stack for document management and solution of other company tasks (video conferences, corporate mail, team-work with documents, data monitoring and analyze etc.).
  • There are three essential reasons why Office 365 will be highly demanded by business: - Business currently needs services for collaborative editing of the huge documents as well as for arrangement and management of their ample quantities; provision of the required safety level in the document workflow systems without additional expenses. Set of the Microsoft services and its integration with MS Office 365 offer solution for these tasks with some minor reservations. -Integration of MS Office 365 with existing services and employment of the off-the-shelf Microsoft solutions for organization of the document workflow are also the promising trends. -Good results can be expected from employment of the cloud-based Azure platform for extension of the MS Office 365 capacities and building process setup and document workflow systems in the small and mid-sized business environment.
  • But if you examine the cross-platform solutions for the offline document editing, MS Office has virtually no rivals with its volume of functionality and compatibility of the document formats.
  • Gary Edwards on 04 Mar 16
     
    "Microsoft Office 365: what is important for business to know about the "cloud-based" office? Cloud-based service Microsoft Office 365 has become more and more popular solution for managing document workflow in companies. Subsequently, the number of MS Office 365 subscribers is growing by tens percent every year. For instance in the third quarter of 2015 the cloud-based services Office 365, Azure and Dynamics CRM became the principal drivers of the profit markup of Microsoft. Office 365: what is going on at the market? Offline version of MS Office has actually not many competitors with the comparable functionality. LibreOffice, OpenOffice, CorelOffice etc. may be referred among them. But if you examine the cross-platform solutions for the offline document editing, MS Office has virtually no rivals with its volume of functionality and compatibility of the document formats. Costs of the full-fledged package MS Office 365 (including its cloud-based capacities) and the offline version of MS Office 2013/2016 for the home users are comparable. Therefore the progressive transition of the majority of users to MS Office 365 may be forecasted. Currently the primary market spreading the MS Office 365 services is the corporate sector. However soon, due to the flexible pricing policy of Microsoft, new home users will progressively give their preference to MS Office 365. Rise of popularity of the off-the-shelf Microsoft solutions in the corporate sector, especially in the midst of the small and mid-sized business, is also expected. Integration of MS Office 365 with SharePoint Online, Exchange Online, Skype, OneDrive, PowerBIand Lync Online allows the full-scaled employment of the MS stack for document management and solution of other company tasks (video conferences, corporate mail, team-work with documents, data monitoring and analyze etc.). "MS Office has virtually no rivals with its volume of functionality and compatibility of the document formats" "
Gary Edwards

How Slack Versus Microsoft Could Play Out - 0 views

fortune.com/...a-sheet-slack-versus-microsoft

Microsoft-Cloud Slack

shared by Gary Edwards on 28 Nov 16 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 28 Nov 16
     
    "Either way, customers win. In early November Microsoft announced a new product called Microsoft Teams. It's a way for groups of people, typically colleagues inside a company, to communicate with each other over multiple, simultaneous conversations. It will be part of the software giant's online Office 365 product, the "productivity" subscription program used by 85 million "knowledge workers" around the world. More than a billion additional customers use the offline version of Office. A relatively small group of people-4 million, to be precise-will recognize something familiar about the new Microsoft offering. That's because it's more or less what a San Francisco startup called Slack does. Microsoft is adding a few bells and whistles, including easier-to-follow threaded conversations and video conferencing. Slack, which took the charmingly old-fashioned step of buying a newspaper ad to "welcome" Microsoft to its game, has said it will match those features. (Fortune, like many journalism organizations, uses Slack; after a year of steadily increasing usage, I've grown to like it.) This isn't the first time Microsoft has unveiled a "Slack killer." In fact, it is becoming something of an annual event. What's more, Slack is growing fast. It has 4 million users, up from 1.25 million a year ago. About 30% of those customers pay either $6.67 or $12.50 per month for the product, depending on which features they use. My back-of-the-envelope calculation of Slack's annual revenue, assuming all customers pay the average of the two price points, is around $140 million. "You're pretty close," Slack founder and CEO Stewart Butterfield told me just before Thanksgiving. "
Gary Edwards

How to Build a Strategic Narrative - HBR - 0 views

hbr.org/...to-build-a-strategic-narrative

Narrative HBR

shared by Gary Edwards on 25 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • You want to know what inspires them, what they are like to work with, and whether they can be counted on. You want to get a sense for them as a person.
  • The context of the narrative must be a human, not an institutional, relationship. People want to get a sense for your company as if it were a person. Human relationships require reciprocity and authenticity. The narrative should say who you are, not just what you do.
  • Shared purpose The cornerstone of a strategic narrative is a shared purpose. This shared purpose is the outcome that you and your customer are working toward together. It’s more than a value proposition of what you deliver to them. Or a mission of what you do for the world. It’s the journey that you are on with them. By having a shared purpose, the relationship shifts from consumer to co-creator.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • One function of the strategic narrative is to explain how the purpose will be fulfilled.
  • The second function of the narrative is to explain the roles necessary to fulfill the shared purpose.
  • To find your brand DNA, go back to the original vision and ethos of your founder(s). Walmart’s value proposition is everyday low prices. It’s by no means unique among retailers. But Walmart’s shared purpose is not about lowering prices, but raising the quality of life. When he founded the company, Sam Walton said, “If we work together, we’ll lower the cost of living for everyone.” Other retailers can match Walmart’s strategy, but not its narrative.
  • Losing the narrative Most companies don’t have a powerful narrative. They are missing the human connection, lack a shared purpose, or are out of alignment with their brand DNA. But the opposite can also be true. Some companies have a powerful narrative and then lose it. Starbucks is one such cautionary tale.
  • In his book Onward, Schultz reveals that Starbucks lost its narrative while he was away. Schultz writes: “Starbucks’ coffee is exceptional, yes, but emotional connection is our true value proposition. Starbucks is not a coffee company that serves people. It is a people company that serves coffee.”
  • Gary Edwards on 25 Mar 16
     
    "It's a common refrain in executive suites these days: "We need a new narrative." It's not enough any more to say "we make widgets." With changes happening so quickly from so many directions - competition, regulation, technology, talent, customer behavior - it's easy for one's story to become generic or outdated. You want a story that inspires employees, excites partners, attracts customers, and engages influencers. A story that is concise but comprehensive. Specific but with room to grow. One that defines the company's vision, communicates the strategy, and embodies the culture. The natural step is to give the assignment to an agency. Most branding firms will come back with a tagline and positioning statement. Most advertising agencies with creative treatments and marketing campaigns. Most PR firms with messaging and communication plans. These are useful tactics but aren't the kind of strategic narrative you are looking for. A strategic narrative is a special kind of story. It says who you are as a company. Where you've been, where you are, and where you are going. How you believe value is created and what you value in relationships. It explains why you exist and what makes you unique. This doesn't come out of the usual competitive landscape, customer interviews, and whiteboard sessions. It takes a different approach and a shift in thinking led by the leadership team. "
Gary Edwards

Dropbox Rolls Out Google Docs Competitor - Cloud Computing on CIO Today - 0 views

www.cio-today.com/...index.php

DropBox

shared by Gary Edwards on 08 Feb 17 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 08 Feb 17
     
    "eady a major player in enterprise file sharing and hosting, Dropbox is launching a public version of its new Paper service to make a name for itself among collaborative productivity suite providers such as Google Docs and Microsoft's Office 365. Paper, which has been available in beta since last year, is aiming to win converts from the big names in the space with a user interface that the company said makes collaboration between coworkers easier. The cloud-based platform will allow users to manage shared documents by assigning different tasks and deadlines to various collaborators. Making Collaboration Easier The service also includes a variety of features designed to make collaboration between team members easier, no matter where in the world they're located. A Paper app is coming to iOS and Android devices to enable users to work on documents even while offline. The Web interface, meanwhile, is currently available in 21 languages, an important feature for multi-lingual teams. These new capabilities join other recent additions such as presentation mode, a feature that turns documents into presentation slides and integration with Google Calendar to make it easier for teams to create and share notes. Paper has already reached early enterprise adopters such as InVision, Ben & Jerry's, Shopify, Campaign Monitor, Getaround and Patreon, according to Dropbox. But the company appears to be positioning Paper to steal market share away from Google Docs and Microsoft Office 365. New Business Plans Going head-to-head with such well-established players will likely be a tall order. To help make Paper more attractive to its enterprise clients, Dropbox is also making its file hosting environment more enterprise-friendly. The latest version of the Web interface, which was released in conjunction with Paper, is more streamlined and potentially easier to navigate. Dropbox has also introduced a new feature that allows users to see others on their teams who have viewed their s
Gary Edwards

The Mind of Marc Andreessen - The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...tomorrows-advance-man

Cloud-Computing Marc-Andreessen VC

shared by Gary Edwards on 12 May 15 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 12 May 15
     
    An amazing article about Marc Andressen and his a16z VC firm on Sand Hill Road. Covers the entire story and provides a great insight into how Silicon Valley and VC industry work. It's long, but nevertheless a must read. Very enjoyable! " At his firm, Andreessen Horowitz, the venture capitalist routinely lays out "what will happen in the next ten, twenty, thirty years." CREDIT PHOTOGRAPH BY JOE PUGLIESE On a bright October morning, Suhail Doshi drove to Silicon Valley in his parents' Honda Civic, carrying a laptop with a twelve-slide presentation that was surely worth at least fifty million dollars. Doshi, the twenty-six-year-old C.E.O. of a data-analytics startup called Mixpanel, had come from San Francisco to Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park, where many of the world's most prestigious venture-capital firms cluster, to pitch Andreessen Horowitz, the road's newest and most unusual firm. Inside the offices, he stood at the head of a massive beechwood conference table to address the firm's deal team and its seven general partners-the men who venture the money, take a seat on the board, and fire the entrepreneur if things go wrong. Marc Andreessen, the firm's co-founder, fixed his gaze on Doshi as he disinfected his germless hands with a sanitizing wipe. Andreessen is forty-three years old and six feet five inches tall, with a cranium so large, bald, and oblong that you can't help but think of words like "jumbo" and "Grade A." Two decades ago, he was the animating spirit of Netscape, the Web browser that launched the Internet boom. In many respects, he is the quintessential Silicon Valley venture capitalist: an imposing, fortyish, long-celebrated white man. (Forbes's Midas List of the top hundred V.C.s includes just five women.) But, whereas most V.C.s maintain a casual-Friday vibe, Andreessen seethes with beliefs. He's an evangelist for the church of technology, afire to reorder life as we know it. He believes that tech products will soon
Gary Edwards

5 great faxing apps for iOS and Android | ITworld - 0 views

www.itworld.com/...-apps-for-ios-and-android.html

FAX IOS-Android

shared by Gary Edwards on 03 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 03 Jun 15
     
    "Like it or not, faxing is still alive and kicking. No need to get a fax machine though -- instead get any of these five apps for faxing and receiving faxes on your phone. FaxBurner If you don't send or receive lots of faxes, this iOS app is the one for you. There's a paid and a free version, but unless you do plenty of faxing, the free one will be what you need. With the free version you get a free fax number, although that number will be different every time you fax. You can receive 25 pages of faxes for free every month, but you can only send five pages total for free. After that you have to pay for it. The best plan is $10 per month for 500 fax pages sent and 500 fax pages received. eFax This one has apps for iOS and Android, and lets you do it from your desktop as well. It has plenty of nice extras, including annotating faxes and signing them. There are several levels of service, but your best bet is eFax Plus, which cost $17 a month and lets you send 150 pages or receive 150 pages. After that it's ten cents a page. FaxFile This iOS and Android app is a good choice if you don't want to pay a monthly fee, and instead prefer to pay for each fax you send and receive. You buy credits ahead of time and then apply them as you send and receive faxes. FreeFax This faxing app for iOS and Android lets you fax a single page a day for free. After that, you pay. A single page doesn't get you very far, but if you send very few faxes, it's worth a try. iFax This app is available for either iOS or Android. You won't get anything for free. Instead, you pay by the pages. For 99 cents you can fax up to five pages, and the price goes up from there. If you've got an Apple Watch you can view your faxes on it."
Gary Edwards

Why companies are switching from Google Apps to Office 365 | CIO - 0 views

www.cio.com/...google-apps-to-office-365.html

Office-365 gDocs

shared by Gary Edwards on 14 Oct 15 - No Cached
  • Microsoft’s increasingly strong Office 365 performance is coming partly at the expense of Google Apps.
  • Microsoft’s increasingly strong Office 365 performance is coming partly at the expense of Google Apps.
  • Microsoft’s increasingly strong Office 365 performance is coming partly at the expense of Google Apps.
  • ...24 more annotations...
  • Microsoft’s increasingly strong Office 365 performance is coming partly at the expense of Google Apps.
  • It’s not just Microsoft saying that Office 365 is growing (COO Kevin Turner claims that four out of five Fortune 500 companies use the service). Last year, cloud security company Bitglass said traffic analysis gave Google twice the market share of Office 365 among its customers, with 16.3 percent of the market; that went up to 22.8 percent this year as more companies switched to cloud services. However, over the same year, Office 365 grew far faster, from 7.7 percent to 25.2 percent. Google has a slight advantage with small businesses (22.8 percent to Microsoft’s 21.4 percent) but in large, regulated businesses (over 1,000 employees), Microsoft’s 30 percent share is twice that of Google and growing fast.
  • It’s not just Microsoft saying that Office 365 is growing (COO Kevin Turner claims that four out of five Fortune 500 companies use the service). Last year, cloud security company Bitglass said traffic analysis gave Google twice the market share of Office 365 among its customers, with 16.3 percent of the market; that went up to 22.8 percent this year as more companies switched to cloud services. However, over the same year, Office 365 grew far faster, from 7.7 percent to 25.2 percent. Google has a slight advantage with small businesses (22.8 percent to Microsoft’s 21.4 percent) but in large, regulated businesses (over 1,000 employees), Microsoft’s 30 percent share is twice that of Google and growing fast.
  • It’s not just Microsoft saying that Office 365 is growing (COO Kevin Turner claims that four out of five Fortune 500 companies use the service). Last year, cloud security company Bitglass said traffic analysis gave Google twice the market share of Office 365 among its customers, with 16.3 percent of the market; that went up to 22.8 percent this year as more companies switched to cloud services. However, over the same year, Office 365 grew far faster, from 7.7 percent to 25.2 percent. Google has a slight advantage with small businesses (22.8 percent to Microsoft’s 21.4 percent) but in large, regulated businesses (over 1,000 employees), Microsoft’s 30 percent share is twice that of Google and growing fast.
  • Microsoft’s increasingly strong Office 365 performance is coming partly at the expense of Google Apps.
  • Microsoft’s increasingly strong Office 365 performance is coming partly at the expense of Google Apps. Motorola’s recent decision to move from an elderly version of Office to Google’s cloud service bucks the more common trend of companies who have been using Google Apps switching to Office 365.
  • 87.3 percent are using Office 365 services, with each organization uploading an average 1.37 terabytes of data to the service each month.
  • That fits what identity management company Okta is seeing. Office 365 is the most commonly deployed application among its customers (beating even Salesforce) and adoption is growing faster than any other cloud applications. It’s also the cloud service customers use the most, probably because that usage includes all the email users send and receive.
  • The only industry segments where Google Apps has more share than Office 365 are in technology; media, Internet and software companies. The smaller the company, the more share Google Apps has among Okta’s customers; but even in the smallest companies Office 365 is still in the lead.
  • “There are different dynamics that matter based on the company size,” McKinnon points out. “Large companies need manageability, security, reliability. You wouldn't see this acceleration of Office 365 in large companies without Microsoft doing a lot of work [in those areas].”
  • The majority of new Office 365 customers are moving from on-premises, but even companies that have already adopted Google Apps for Business are switching to Office.
  • Microsoft claimed they won back 440 customers in 2013, including big names like Burger King and Campbell’s, and the trend is continuing. Some of that may be the halo effect of the Office 365 growth making companies that picked Google Apps question whether they made the right decision. But often, it’s because of dissatisfaction with Google Apps itself.
  • The simplicity of Gmail and Google Docs clearly appeals to some users, but as one of the most widely used applications in the world, the Office software is familiar to many. “When you put these products into companies, the user interface really matters,” McKinnon says. “For email, the user interface really matters.
  • Google Apps is dramatically different from Office and that’s pretty jarring for people who’ve been using Outlook for a long time. It's like it beamed in from outer space; you have to use a browser, the way it does conversations and threading with labels versus folders, it's pretty jarring.”
  • Even if you like the Google backend better, you have thousands of users saying ‘what happened to my folders?’”
  • And it’s hard to use Outlook with Google, many customers report. “Some companies, they go to Google and they think they are going to make it work with Outlook; what they find out when they start using the calendar is that it just doesn’t work as well with the Google Apps backend as it does when you’re using Office 365. The user interface is so important that it pulls them back in.
  • If you’re pushing somebody who's used to an Office environment into a Google cloud, they're going to feel this vacuum because they no longer have the programs they're familiar with. It represents a huge investment in time that people aren't going to be receptive to. And you have Microsoft saying ‘for just $3 a month more you could have all these great programs you're used to. Now they’ve got the pricing so you get more than you get on Google, what Microsoft is offering is fantastic, and for $3 more it’s a premium worth paying. Microsoft is still the king of hill for a reason.”
  • “Quite frankly, Google is completely outclassed by Office 365 in this arena and despite the price difference corporations who made the switch to Google Apps to save money usually end up coming back within a year.
  • The primary driver of this appears to be Outlook integration over everything else, followed by the inability to do some advanced things that Microsoft Office excels at.”
  • For larger companies, this goes beyond the familiarity of Outlook into advanced features. “You can integrate Skype into Outlook, you can integrate OneDrive for Business into Outlook.
  • It becomes essentially like a command center, and there is nothing Google gives you that does that.
  • “The reason people have been moving to Google is cost,”
  • But a lot of people don’t find the usability and collaboration nearly as effective as Office 365.”
  • It’s not just Microsoft saying that Office 365 is growing (COO Kevin Turner claims that four out of five Fortune 500 companies use the service). Last year, cloud security company Bitglass said traffic analysis gave Google twice the market share of Office 365 among its customers, with 16.3 percent of the market; that went up to 22.8 percent this year as more companies switched to cloud services. However, over the same year, Office 365 grew far faster, from 7.7 percent to 25.2 percent. Google has a slight advantage with small businesses (22.8 percent to Microsoft’s 21.4 percent) but in large, regulated businesses (over 1,000 employees), Microsoft’s 30 percent share is twice that of Google and growing fast.Office 365 is even more popular with the 21 million customers of Skyhigh Network’s cloud security services, where 87.3 percent are using Office 365 services, with each organization uploading an average 1.37 terabytes of data to the service each month.
  • Gary Edwards on 14 Oct 15
     
    "The combination of familiar software and enterprise-class support is bringing early adopters disappointed by Google's lack of progress back to Microsoft."
Gary Edwards

SaaStr Slides: The Key Drivers for SaaS SuccessFor Entrepreneurs | For Entrepreneurs - 0 views

www.forentrepreneurs.com/saastr

David-Skok entrepreneurs SaaS SaaStr-Conference

shared by Gary Edwards on 11 Feb 16 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 11 Feb 16
     
    "SaaS/subscription businesses are much more complex than traditional businesses, and SaaS performance cannot be measured in the same way as traditional businesses are measured. Based on a talk given at the SaaStr Annual Conference in San Francisco, this slide deck offers a comprehensive and detailed look at the key metrics that are needed to understand and optimize a SaaS business, and how these can be used to drive SaaS success. This presentation includes information on: An intro to SaaS metrics Unit economics LTV and churn: An in-depth look Variable pricing axes Months to recover CAC The primary unit of growth: Sales Understanding public SaaS companies"
Gary Edwards

Microsoft limits unlimited OneDrive for Business storage to priciest Office 365 enterpr... - 0 views

www.cio.com/...fice-365-enterprise-plans.html

Office-365 OneDrive

shared by Gary Edwards on 17 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • Microsoft yesterday announced that only the priciest enterprise Office 365 subscription plans will be eligible for an unlimited OneDrive for Business storage allotment.
  • "We ... recognize we are disappointing customers who expected unlimited storage across every Office 365 plan, and I want to apologize for not meeting your expectations," said Jeff Teper, Microsoft's top OneDrive executive, in a post to a company blog yesterday.
  • Previously, Microsoft had said that all Office 365 customers would have a never-ending supply of storage in OneDrive for Business, the service for commercial customers. As of Thursday, the firm's roadmap for the subscription service still states, "Moving forward, all Office 365 customers will get unlimited OneDrive storage at no additional cost [emphasis added."
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Microsoft significantly revised that on Wednesday. Only the most expensive Office 365 plans -- Enterprise E3, the to-be-retired Enterprise E4, and the new Enterprise E5 plans -- will offer unlimited storage if more than five users are on the plan. And then only in stages, with each increase requiring Microsoft's approval.
  • Office 365 Enterprise E3 lists at $20 per user per month (or $240 annually), while E5 -- which replaces E4, with the latter set to fall off the catalog by June 2016 -- runs $35 per user per month ($420 annually). Less expensive plans, including the $12.50 per user per month ($150 annually) Business Premium, will have a 1TB cap on OneDrive for Business.
  • Naturally, Microsoft would love if Business Essentials users upgraded to E3 to get, among other things, more OneDrive space, as the company would see a 60% revenue jump from those customers.
  • Microsoft has made other moves recently to boost revenue from Office, including a 59% price increase in the top-tier enterprise-grade plan.
  • Microsoft hasn't gotten around to changing the Office 365 roadmap, which continues to promise unlimited OneDrive and OneDrive for Business storage space.
  • Gary Edwards on 17 Dec 15
     
    " "We ... recognize we are disappointing customers who expected unlimited storage across every Office 365 plan, and I want to apologize for not meeting your expectations," said Jeff Teper, Microsoft's top OneDrive executive, in a post to a company blog yesterday. Previously, Microsoft had said that all Office 365 customers would have a never-ending supply of storage in OneDrive for Business, the service for commercial customers. As of Thursday, the firm's roadmap for the subscription service still states, "Moving forward, all Office 365 customers will get unlimited OneDrive storage at no additional cost [emphasis added." Microsoft significantly revised that on Wednesday. Only the most expensive Office 365 plans -- Enterprise E3, the to-be-retired Enterprise E4, and the new Enterprise E5 plans -- will offer unlimited storage if more than five users are on the plan. And then only in stages, with each increase requiring Microsoft's approval. Between now and March, Microsoft will increase the storage allowance for customers on those plans -- as well as the corresponding ones for government customers and education -- from the current 1TB to 5TB. After that, companies and organizations that want more will have to ask for it."
Gary Edwards

ConnectWise CEO: Partners seeing Microsoft Office cloud push as 'crushing' - from Chann... - 0 views

www.channelnomics.com/...-office-cloud-push-as-crushing

Office Office365 Office-365 Productivity

shared by Gary Edwards on 21 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 21 Mar 16
     
    "Microsoft's push to get customers to run their applications on the cloud is challenging channel partners who are comfortable selling the way they currently sell, according to Arnie Bellini, CEO of Connectwise. He says although partners may be reluctant to see their managed services lifestyle changed, it's time all Microsoft and Connectwise partners start considering a cloud services practice. Bellini pointed out that many ConnectWise and Microsoft solution providers are "reluctant" to embrace building a cloud services practice because "life is good" in managed services and predictable recurring revenue. But with the way Microsoft prices on-premise versus cloud Office offerings, no reasonable business person will opt for on-premise anymore, creating challenges for channel partners, Bellini told Channelnomics. "When it's under [a customer's] roof, MSPs are very comfortable because they know they can manage and monitor it and they become very sticky with their client as a result," he said. "But once that infrastructure moves from under the roof to the Microsoft cloud, they feel they will lose control. They feel they will not be able to bill for those services, and that's what Microsoft is asking them to do. They saying you've got to...resell Office 365 and bill your clients for it. The logistics of all of that are crushing to Microsoft partners.""
Gary Edwards

Domo CEO Josh James interview - Business Insider - 0 views

www.businessinsider.com/eo-josh-james-interview-2016-3

Domo Business-Cloud Josh-James

shared by Gary Edwards on 23 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • The Domo platform takes data from almost any other imaginable business app, from Salesforce to Instagram, and pushes it into one place with real-time updates. If a sales rep wants to see how many likes a post got on Facebook from a certain territory in Nebraska, Domo boasts that it's the place. 
  • Similarly, if a marketing person isn't generating enough leads, the algorithm can flag it and indicate that it's time to pick up the pace if they're going to make quota. There's even a chat functionality for people in the business to talk to each other about the data.
  • Now that Domo's customers past and present have adjusted to the idea of uploading and mashing all of their data from every source under the sun, James says they're ready for the next step. "You've paid the original price to get in the game," James says.  With the new Domo, all of that data gets a shiny new interface that lets you see what anyone else in in the company is working on. James says that he uses the new Domo app himself to create the slides that he presents to his company's board of directors, who can actually track Domo's progress even as deals close.  "There's no other board in the world that has every bit of data about just one company," James says.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • James says that with all of that data being updated and presented in real-time, it drastically cuts down on his number of meetings — why have a two-hour long meeting to present data that everybody already knows? And it can do the same for any employee anywhere in the business, he says.
  • And it's better than Slack, James says, because it's "not the watercooler, but the metrics" — every conversation is around a piece of business data, not just a freewheeling meeting where people can say whatever comes to mind, which isn't "how businesspeople think."
  • But given the company's reliance on outside services for data, James says that he doesn't really like to think of Domo displacing any other company, so much as it is a brand-new way of thinking about data that all comes together. 
  • Gary Edwards on 23 Mar 16
     
    "Domo has a new upgraded app, called "The Business Cloud," announced at today's Domopalooza event in Salt Lake City. It takes all of the data that Domo has gotten so good at importing from other business apps and lays it all out in a slick interface. James says it lets a customer manage literally every aspect of their business, in real-time.  This souped-up system has been in the works since Domo was founded in 2010, James says, and has taken over $500 million in R&D investment. "
Gary Edwards

Gartner shows two-horse race in IaaS cloud: AWS and Microsoft Azure | CIO - 0 views

www.cio.com/...d-aws-and-microsoft-azure.html

Cloud-Computing Cloud-Productivity-Platform

shared by Gary Edwards on 25 May 15 - No Cached
  • AWS and Azure are the only two vendors in the “leaders” quadrant of the report, with AWS clearly taking the top spot. A series of other providers – including Google, CenturyLink, Rackspace, VMware, Virtustream and to a lesser extent IBM’s SoftLayer received fairly high marks, but none have clouds that rival those from the big two. Between AWS, Azure and all the other vendors, there are significant differences, though, so Gartner says it’s important to pick the one that most closely aligns to your needs.
  • AWS was the first to market with an IaaS offering, based on Xen-virtualized servers and hasn’t looked back. It is the “overwhelming market share leader,” is “extraordinarily innovative, exceptionally agile, and very responsive to the market,” and holds a multi-year competitive advantage over Microsoft and Google, Gartner says.
  • AWS can be complex though. Pricing structures can be confusing and opaque – it charges individually for some services that other vendors bundle. This leads many AWS users to employ a third-party management vendor to help manage costs and deployments.
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  • Azure – the clear second choice Microsoft’s significant market share in the enterprise IT market combined with its continual investments in Azure make it the chief competitor to AWS. The company has a compelling bundled offering: Its public cloud integrates closely with its on-premises management tools, such as Windows Server and Systems Center. While it’s not at the scale of AWS, Gartner estimates that Azure has more than twice as much cloud IaaS capacity all the other vendors in the MQ, other than AWS.
  • If there are any cautions against Azure, it is that some features are not fully production ready. For example, Azure has been plagued with significant outages – something AWS battled a few years ago – so Gartner recommends that customers using Azure for mission-critical workloads employ a secondary, non-Azure disaster recovery backup plan.
  • The vendor perhaps most likely to take on the leaders in public IaaS cloud is Google. It has a massive data center footprint that it uses to run its own operations, which it now makes available for customers to use. This approach has allowed Google to quickly offer a compelling IaaS without significant investment. But the company is not an “enterprise vendor” in terms of its sales, support and partner offerings. “Google needs to earn the trust of businesses,” Gartner says.
  • A company like IBM has somewhat of an opposite problem from Google, Gartner says. It has a broad set of initiatives in the cloud (through SoftLayer), including managed hosting, application development (through BlueMix), SaaS and bare-metal provisioning. But Gartner says they are not bundled well. Rackspace is another company that has a strong set of offerings – from public IaaS cloud, to managed cloud, hosted private cloud and even bare-metal services as well. But the company no longer specializes in self-service public cloud and instead is targeting customers who are looking to take advantage of its support expertise in deploying applications, limiting the company’s reach.
  • VMware is having trouble with adoption as well, Gartner says. VCloud Air is its public IaaS cloud, but Gartner says the most likely advocates of that platform are VMware administrators, not business managers and development leaders who may be in better positions to drive cloud strategies. Those VMware administrators may be more comfortable building out a private-cloud than using VMware’s public cloud. CSC offers its own public cloud offering but it also provides consulting to help customers choose the best IaaS platform. A lack of investments in value-add services have led CSC advisers to recommend competitors clouds more than its own, Gartner says. HP was dropped from the Gartner report this year because it’s focusing on a hybrid cloud strategy and its public Helion cloud division doesn’t have enough market share to qualify.
  • Gary Edwards on 25 May 15
     
    "Research firm Gartner's annual report card on the public IaaS cloud computing market shows there is one clear leader - Amazon Web Services - and another clear challenger - Microsoft Azure. And then there is everyone else. "The market is dominated by only a few global providers - most notably Amazon Web Services, but increasingly also Microsoft Azure," Gartner researchers say, giving Google Cloud Platform an honorable mention. "Between them, these three providers comprise the majority of workloads running in public cloud IaaS in 2015.""
Gary Edwards

Office and the iPad Pro: It's just business, stupid | CIO - 0 views

www.cio.com/...-its-just-business-stupid.html

Office-365 Pricing

shared by Gary Edwards on 01 Oct 15 - No Cached
  • Microsoft will require owners of Apple's not-sold-until-November iPad Pro to pay for almost all functionality in its Office suite, a point neither Microsoft nor Apple bothered to highlight this month when the latter invited the former to share stage time at the tablet's introduction. IT Resume Makeover: How to add flavor to a bland resume Don't count on your 'plain vanilla' resume to get you noticed - your resume needs a personal flavor to Read Now But that's not news. Recommendations CSO Hacking Team hacked, attackers claim 400GB in dumped data ITworld Up your coding game with these 7 habits of great programmers Network World VMware CEO hits on network virtualization reality, feuding with Cisco & the... More INSIDER Microsoft is simply sticking with a formula it crafted almost a year ago and has echoed since: It would field one version of a touch-centric, made-for-mobile Office but divvy up customers into two pools, each getting a different mix of free from the freemium business model they shared.
  • Potential iPad Pro customers can be excused for being confused. Office on the iPad Air 2, Apple's latest 9.7-in. tablet, is free for most document creation and editing chores when used by consumers. And the list of the not-free features is small and, not surprisingly, slanted toward business users. The overall impression, then, is the Office is free when the messenger is a consumer, or the target audience of the report is consumer.
  • But Office is not free. Not by a long shot. And therein lies Microsoft's motivation for the two pools.
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • While Microsoft seems glad to give away Office Mobile to consumers -- with some exceptions -- its revenue model requires that it make money from business workers.
  • That's easiest to see, and understand, when one realizes that the difference between what's available to one pool but not the other is that the two are identified not as free/not-free, but as non-commercial and commercial.
  • By Microsoft's current licensing, any use of any feature of any Office Mobile app on any device -- whether smartphone, tablet or 2-in-1 -- for a business purpose requires an Office 365 subscription, specifically a small business- or enterprise-grade plan. Want to edit a work-related document in Word Mobile? Office 365 is required. Want to view a work-related spreadsheet in Excel Mobile? Office 365 again. Show a PowerPoint Mobile slide on the job? Ditto.
  • The "separate agreement" mentioned in the license is an eligible Office 365 subscription: Office 365 Business ($8.25 per user per month), Office 365 Business Premium ($12.50), Office 365 ProPlus ($12) or Office 365 Enterprise E3 ($20).
  • Consumers, of course, get most Office Mobile functionality free, and all features when they subscribe to Office 365 Personal ($70 annually or $7 monthly) or Office 365 Personal ($100 a year, $10 a month). But business users, or more accurately those who use the apps for anything but personal, non-commercial, work? They pay, always, to be legal.
  • What's apparently miffed people -- read consumers -- is that Office Mobile on larger devices isn't free for them.
  • Microsoft's used screen size to separate what it considers consumer-grade tablets from those it believes are suited for business, with the break-point at 10.1-in.
  • The confusion among consumers comes from the licensing of Office Mobile on devices with screens larger than 10.1-in. For those devices -- which includes Microsoft's own Surface Pro 3 and Surface 3 -- consumers get little for free: Essentially only viewing documents. What Microsoft dubs as "core editing" isn't available for free to consumers on larger-screened hardware.
  • That's because Microsoft classifies devices with displays 10.1-in. and larger as business systems, no matter who buys them or for what purpose.
  • The inclusion of Office 365 Personal on the Surface 3 -- and if Microsoft extended the same offer to buyers of the new Surface Pro 4 -- allows consumers to run Office Mobile on the larger screens, at least for the one-year free subscription's stretch.
  • That lets Microsoft give its Surface clan an edge over Apple's iPad Pro, for it certainly will not bundle the Office Mobile apps or an Office 365 subscription with its rival's 2-in-1, not without making Apple pony up.
  • Even bundling, though, only affects consumers; businesses won't get the same deal. Bottom line: Consumers may get a free Office ride, of sorts. But businesses? No way.
Gary Edwards

​802.11ac - CES 2015: D-Link attempts to break 1Gbps Wi-Fi speed barrier | ZDNet - 0 views

www.zdnet.com/...eaks-1gbps-wi-fi-speed-barrier

wifi MiMO 802.11ac-WAVE2

shared by Gary Edwards on 05 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • D-Link isn't using the current 802.11ac 2013 standard for its new line of high-speed routers; instead, it's using the latest Broadcom chipset based on the still unratified 802.11ac 2015 standard, aka Wave 2. This new wave of technology pushes the theoretical limit of Wi-Fi to 7Gbps.
  • In addition, Wave 2 supports multi-user MIMO, which enables simultaneous multiple spatial streams to multiple clients. Multi-user MIMO is seen as being as big an improvement for Wi-Fi as the jump from shared to switched Ethernet was for wired networking.
  • Multi-user MIMO, however, won't be supported in the AC3200. You'll need to wait for the next two models in this new Wi-Fi router family to appear later this year for that.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • A D-Link product manager assured me at CES that this router, and its two forthcoming even faster brothers -- the AC5300 ULTRA Wi-Fi Router (DIR-895L/R) and AC3100 ULTRA Wi-Fi Router (DIR-885L/R) -- would be brought up to code with firmware upgrades.
  • D-Link promises that the three routers in the ULTRA Performance Series will deliver "chart-topping wireless speeds up to 5.3 Gbps ." I'm not so sure about that last boast, but what I do know is that in order to break the 1Gbps barrier you'll need to use D-Link's ULTRA AC1900 Wi-Fi USB Adapter (DWA-192) on your existing laptops and desktop PCs. Even a brand new computer with an 802.11ac Wave 1 chipset won't be able to crack the high-speed wall.
  • Besides sheer speed, these new routers also feature Wireless 11AC Beamforming to enhance signal strength and throughput; Smart Connect to automatically assign clients to the wireless band providing the best bandwidth; and an advanced QoS engine with a drag-and-drop UI to provide an easy way to prioritize applications and devices.
  • The D-Link AC3200 ULTRA Wi-Fi Router is available now for $309.99. The other two routers and the AC1900 USB adapter won't show up until the second quarter, and pricing has yet to be announced.
  • Gary Edwards on 05 Jan 15
     
    "Ever since 802.11ac started appearing in routers we've been dreaming of getting honest-to-goodness 1 Gigabit per second (Gbps) Wi-Fi speeds. Ha! The fastest 802.11ac router CNET or ZDNet has seen to date, the Asus AC2400 RT-AC87U Dual-band Wireless Gigabit Router delivers 504 Megabits per second (Mbps) to clients. D-Link's new AC3200 ULTRA Wi-Fi Router (DIR-890L/R), introduced at CES, promises to deliver speeds of up to 1.3Gbps."
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