TheAgileStartup

Amazon's Cloud Crash Loses Customer Data - b2b2dot0 Won't

Let's start this post off by saying it's really not a good thing for anyone (except maybe the blogosphere) that Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service went down last week. 

On-Demand B2B Webshops for SAP Business All-in-One

SAP's Business All-in-One is a brilliant offering designed to allow a small to mid size corporation to transition onto a fully integrated ERP platform in less than 4 months. 

Five Things You'll Never Hear from EDI Lovers

I used to loathe EDI (electronic data interchange).  Its promise to totally automate the industrial supply chain with "hands free" computer-to-computer interchange of key business documents seemed to threaten the fundamental existence of b2b2dot0.  We had a bit of drama at b2b2dot0 last week that...once again...reinforced the fact that while hype may make our job difficult, reality presents our opportunities. 

There's a SaaS App For That!

A little over a year ago I wrote a blog post entitled "My Love/Hate Relationship with Internet Applications".  Today I'm going to add two new services to my list of applications that I'm falling in love with.  They are TimeBridge and Dropbox.

Monitoring b2b2dot0's SaaS Availability

At the heart of the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) business model is the understanding that the service will always be available when needed.  In our 24x7 flattened world, that pretty much means all the time. 

Agility in Action - Supporting an SAP Distribution Center Relocation in Real Time

One of our clients innocently sends us an email on Tuesday, April 27th asking us to close up one of their microsites in 3 days...for 3 days...in support of relocating one of their distribution centers.  The request was a simple one, "deactivate all of our French users, and only our French users, for the specified time period, so that we can make the physical and logical changes to our distribution model." 

ThinkStrategies' Evaluation of b2b2dot0's SAP Hybrid Cloud Offering

Several weeks ago, Jeffrey Kaplan of ThinkStrategies published a challenge to Cloud Vendors for 2010 in eCommerce Times.  I thought it would be fun to see how we stacked up against them, so here goes.

SaaS? Multitenant? ASP? Cloud? Oh My!

I've resisted writing about this topic for the past two years because I didn't think it really mattered.  After all, who cares how we architect our application and hosting infrastructure? 

The Evolution of b2b2dot0's Client Services

Last September I wrote a post entitled "Customer Support in an SAP Integrated World".  In that post I discussed the (positive) impact that our "On-Demand" model has had on our ability to respond to our clients from a technical perspective.  Today I'd like to take a look at the impact that the On Demand model has on our client services from a business model perspective.

John Wookey Evolves SAP's Cloud Story

Last June, six months into John Wookey's tenure as head of SAP's cloud offerings, I wrote about his view of the world at the time.  It was mostly based on this presentation that Mr. Wookey gave at the SIIA OnDemand Europe Conference. 

SAP Attempts to Discredit the Cloud

CIO Magazine recently published an interview with SAP's Chief Technology Officer, Vishal Sikka, entitled "Cloud Won't Do for Critical Applications".  Frankly, not only did I find his comments quite disingenuous, but considering our experiences of the past year and a half, they were deliciously ironic.

The Anatomy of a Hack Attack

Yesterday started off like any other day. 

I scanned my overnight emails, read our daily production log, attended our daily standup meeting and then planned my priorities for the day.  High on my list was to research a competitor that we were about to do battle with.  Little did I know that half way around the world in Chennai, India, they had the same priority. 

Customer Support in an SAP Integrated SaaS World

Google just alerted me to a blog posting on the SAP Developer's Network.  It is entitled "How to Improve your CRM eCommerce Support".  As I read it, I came to the stark realization that we at b2b2dot0, and our clients, take an awful lot for granted when it comes to the value that the Software as a Service business model brings to customer services.  Today's post will shed a light on the topic.

The Love/Hate Relationship with Internet Applications

Last week was one of those "wrestle with my laptop" weeks.  In the process I confronted my love/hate relationship with internet applications head on. 

Aberdeen Report on SaaS ROI

I just read the January 2009 (yes, I'm behind in my reading) Aberdeen Report entitled "Retail on Demand: Software as a Service (SaaS) Takes Off" by Sahir Anand.  Since we work with, and speak to, a lot of manufacturers in the industry, I thought I would calibrate Aberdeen's findings with b2b2dot0's experiences.

SAP preemptively lays off 3000

These really are crazy economic times.  I can understand it when companies like Kodak, Starbucks, Caterpillar and CitiCorp announce layoffs.  Noone is buying their products or they've dug themselves into such a deep hole that only slashing expenses can give them a ray of hope to survive.

6 Things SaaS Needs to do in 2009

Information Week published this article today with the sub-heading of:

Software as a service is making headway, but can't yet be called a game-changer in the enterprise software market. Here's what must happen for SaaS to gain wider acceptance in 2009.

I thought I'd take a stab at holding ourselves up against their scorecard.

Two mouse clicks in Shanghai...

...generate a buzz in Raleigh and Zurich.  This post will recount two parallel stories in Rashomon style that transpired last week.  One version is from the perspective of a user in Shanghai, China and the other is b2b2dot0's "behind the scenes" perspective in both our US and European headquarters. 

Software-as-a-Service is unAmerican

Well...the actual title of the ComputerWorld blog posting by Mark Everett Hall is "How SaaS hurts a fragile IT economy" but there is no doubt that Mark is labeling me as a traitor.  I'm one of a growing number of industry executives who are killing our IT economy...so he suggests.