Welcome to part 5 of my 6 part series on how the cloud is changing the economics of business. This post focuses on an economic challenge that many founders are facing: The SaaS model is driving the prices of services down while the engineering efforts required to deliver on-demand services is more complex than in past models driving costs up. In other words, it takes a significant amount of engineering to build a real time, highly... Read More
What corporate IT should learn from Startups: Part 2 – Roadmaps
As I have mentioned in numerous posts over the last several months, I am finding that things like process, governance, architecture, SOA, cloud computing, and others are much easier in my new startup world than in my old corporate world that I battled in since the 80′s. Even though I never intend to return to the corporate world I feel obligated to share with my colleagues in the corporate world because I know how hard it can be innovate... Read More
What corporate IT should learn from Startups: Part 1 – Process
I have spent well over 20 years in corporate IT environments, most of it working for IT shops in the 100-300 person range. In every company that I worked for, IT was seen as a bottleneck and IT struggled to satisfy the needs of the business. In many companies, this is the standard. The reasons for these struggles can be boiled down into the following categories: 1) Process – Too much, too little, or the wrong process for the... Read More
Startups, cloud computing, and the freedom to innovate
I was the guest writer for this week’s Zapflash article for the guys at Zapthink. I wrote a piece talking about how startups have been the ones innovating with cloud computing while the bigger, established companies are still trying to understand the pros and cons of the cloud. In this article I discuss my own personal experience where the well established paper coupon industry is in a mad dash to transform itself to paperless. The... Read More
Observations of a burned out corporate soldier turned entrepreneur
As I reflect on the year 2009, my first full year at my new startup, I thought I would share my observations as I look back at the challenges that I used to deal with throughout my long corporate career. From Enterprise Initiatives In November of 2008, I joined a startup called M-Dot Network as CTO and employee #1. I had spent the first 23 years of my professional career working for medium sized corporations with IT shops in the... Read More
