Cloud Productivity War: Microsoft goes down and Google releases two new killer features

There is a war on and it’s clear who the two main players are at the moment. Microsoft is the incumbent and Google is the cheeky contender. I thought I’d add a little coverage to this as it’s quite interesting to watch.

Quick disclosure: I currently work promoting both of these products and these views are my own not my employers..

Microsoft BPOS goes down
According to Infoworld Microsoft BPOS (Business Productivity Suite) soon to become O365 went down on Tuesday 18th for anything between 6-9 hours depending on who you are.

This is not ideal since their launch of the beta for Office 365, a rebaked BPOS, has been going so well with 17,000 companies signed up. The industry at both the selling and buying end have been sitting on the edge of their seats waiting for this launch, which is if you believe the marketing going to change everything and it might for these reasons:

• Companies will be able to easily deploy familiar tools
• IT managers on the whole like Microsoft
• This will probably open the door for other vendors such as Google

There is no doubt that the licensing model that is offered is revolutionary in Microsoft terms and will save alot of companies money and make their lives significantly less complicated.

Google drops in two key features
I quite like Google Apps, I use the web based mail client daily but until now haven’t been drawn into the docs side. The main reason is I mostly work with spreadsheets and they were missing the two key features needed:

• Autofilter: So that you can select a subsection from all of your rows of data
• PivotTables: To make sense of everything

Now they’re in I can’t see why I won’t use it beyond habit of using desktop based spreadsheet apps. From an overall strategic perspective these two releases show that Google really are aiming to create an Office suite replacement. I look forwards to more releases..

Conclusion so far
Both of these products are big contenders, the market at large feel that this is new stuff. In tech world we use them everyday but penetration into the SMB and Enterprise world is relatively slow vs consumer adoption of new tech like tablets. That said as everyone warms to the idea I expect there to be a cloud rush coming over the next 12-18 months..

Three good Cloud Computing Podcasts

These guys have some good commentary on cloud computing, worth adding to your podcaster/itunes.

Cloud Computing Podcast
Good commentary on cloud news and events and key topics. This is a really good one if you’re at any level of an organisation looking for a ‘no-hype’ look at cloud.
RSS: http://feeds.feedburner.com/CloudComputingPodcast

Cloud Cafe
Interviews with cloud industry thought leaders
RSS: http://feeds.feedburner.com/CloudCafe

Overcast: Conversations on Cloud Computing
A podcast series on cloud computing.
RSS: http://feeds.feedburner.com/overcast

Google wants to kill the IT Manager?

I was going to write an article about how IT departments need to change and embrace cloud, sadly I accidentally deleted the post, then Google announced chromebooks.

Chromebooks
Chromebooks are easily managed estates of laptops, Googles dream being that everything runs through a browsers.

Pros: On the face of it they seem very easy to manage
Cons: Companies still run quite a few non-browser based applications, d I’m sure these could be run through a terminal window on the chromebook..

IT Managers
From experience over the last four years, I’ve found that there are two breeds of IT manager, these are extreme poles so there is a happy medium here as well..
Type A
-Focussed on delivering new technology to the business, software..
-Sees commodity IT as a pain and risk

Type B
-Majority of time is spent maintaining desktops, network, file server, email & other systems
-Very averse to any thing new

Accenture ran a study last week which showed that Cloud is being driven not by IT but by management, the promise of lower cost and more flexible IT is very appealing.

Given that IT historically IT has always demanded bigger budgets to deliver innovation within business, why the sudden shyness to cloud, undoubtedly the concern around potentially lower headcounts.

Conclusion
So what does all this mean? Well a whole lot of change if Google gets its way, historically they’ve done ok, they’re Google Apps products are pretty punchy and based on the rate of new features they release their Chromebooks could do pretty well but this will be a long play.

Google are also furiously hiring, LinkedIn brings up 140 open positions with a very clear, we want to hire lots of people strategy vs. the likes of Microsoft who seem to have flattened out.

What does it mean for our IT manager, the ‘Type A’ is pretty safe they now potentially will have another tool in their armory to help innovate further. Our ‘Type B’ really needs to prove their worth and transform their role into an enabler and aid to the business.

If I was hiring an IT manager today I would definitely want some cloud experience. A quick look at the IT job boards shows that not everyone feels the same way with only a handful ‘IT Manager’ roles with the the keyword Cloud’.

One thing is sure, change and disruption is going to start kicking around very soon..

Who are you selling to?

While doing a little bit of research for images for some sales training I’m doing today I came across an article this morning which I felt was particularly worthy of a quick post.

The article is here and what I like about it in particular is that it goes into granular detail around what you should be looking for within the sphere’s of influence and the attributes of the individuals involved..

In particular I like:
Who has a great track record?
Who has a spotty track record?
Who has a solid reputation in the company or community?
Who has a past history with other people here?

It’s really critical to understand who you’re talking to in an organisation and not only their position but also how appreciated they are. These are all things which you can find out by talking to your lead or others within the organisation you’re trying to break into.

Pitching/Cold Calling Introduction Checklist

I won’t take credit for writing this as I didn’t, but if you’re approaching anyone be it an investor or a potential lead you should consider all the points.

Try and make sure that the first two sentences that come out cover off a couple if not all of the points below.

Before you make any contact, your prospect is in this situation

• I don’t know who you are
• I don’t know your company
• I don’t know your company’s product
• I don’t know what your company stands for
• I don’t know your company’s customers
• I don’t know your company’s record
• I don’t know your company’s reputation
• Now… What was it you wanted to sell me?

From: http://www.salesdnaltd.com/blog/what-was-it-you-wanted-to-sell-me/#more-388

It would be great to read your pitches in the comments below..

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5 Ways to Get your company some attention. Now

The 1st week of the year was always going to have lots of planning, long conference calls and some deep thinking as to what we should all be doing for the next 3-6 months to win some new clients. Myself included.

Over last week I spoke to:
-A digital marketing agency about their hedge fund clients
-Jim & Stuart @ Geo.me – Awesome online mapping tools to show and manipulate data
-Nick Barker @ Aware Monitoring – Great website performance & availability monitoring

A few things came out of all of these conversations. The main thing that I found was the difficulty that people have in finding out what their target audience is interested in. While perhaps obvious to others it’s never been perfectly clear to me what people are interested in or more importantly how to get the interest of the b2b or consumer market I’m targeting without working hard at it.

Some ideas that came through

-Do cool stuff
This is an old one and most of us know about it but it’s so under-used. After geo.me created this climate map and tweeted it out @timberners_lee picked it up and retweeted getting them some well deserved promotion.






Another example is Bill Shrinks smartphone comparison table which was featured on mashable.



-Talk about who you are targeting
This one works best for b2b but if you start talking about what the people you want to speak to are doing, sooner or later they’ll notice you. Even commenting on their blog?

-Hang out with the connectors in your industry
Who has all the twitter followers or is featured in every trade magazine for your sector? Find them and make friends, but don’t pester. Be human. If you can get them recommending you to their peers you’re on the road to goodness.

-Forums, Forums, Forums, Forums
If you’re stuck for a blog article the worst thing you can do is post random crap. Head out to the forums, most allow you to organise by views and do quite advanced searches.
Search last month & Arrange by views you will find some problems you know about or can spend some time researching solutions to. Then post your blog post back to the thread. SEOMoz did an interesting experiment to see if answering questions on Yahoo Answers would be more cost effective at generating leads over PPC. It worked out ~28% less on CPC.

-Send emails & call people
Staring at your twitter feed will not make sales. I really wish it would but it doesn’t. Email people, call people and ask them questions.

-Don’t bark up the wrong tree
If a company or a contact doesn’t work out move on, there are more fish in the sea.