David Skok

In this article I interview Aaron Ross, co-author of a new book, Predictable Revenue. Aaron discusses his experience at Salesforce.com starting a new group that used an innovative outbound prospecting approach (involving no cold calls) to create new leads. Aaron’s group came up with several important breakthroughs which enabled them add over $100m in incremental [...] ... (more)

The Application Server Market

The application server category is one of the more confusing markets to understand. In addition, the market changed rapidly during 1998, with a number of companies being acquired. This article aims to clarify the situation. Software: A History of Consolidating Services on New Platforms Looking back at the major shifts that have taken place in the software industry, a trend emerges that is a helpful indicator of what is likely to happen in the evolution of the application server market. As new platforms emerge, there are generally a number of players providing point products that ... (more)

J2EE for the Real World

The advent of J2EE (Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition), a market-revolutionizing industry specification that standardizes the way that application servers work, sets the stage for a collision of two markets: content management/personalization and back-end data access/transactions. It also becomes a driving force as organizations move to create powerful new e-business applications that bring together all forms of electronic interaction for customers, trading partners and employees. The J2EE standard has been uniformly adopted by almost every application server vendor and is bein... (more)

Battle In The Making

Portals, e-commerce sites, B2B commerce and so on...we're witnessing unprecedented demand for e-business solutions of every stripe as companies rush to put their businesses on the Web. With Y2K now out of the way, this has become the top IT priority. In the past many of these solutions have been built on top of IRM (Internet Relationship Management) products such as Vignette and BroadVision whose primary specialization has been content management and personalization. For early Web sites, mostly serving up static content, this was sufficient. But once the basic site is up and run... (more)

How Sales Complexity Impacts Your Startup’s Viability

There is no question that success for the entrepreneur starts with a breakthrough (or at the very least great) product or service. Yet too often, entrepreneurs fall into the "field of dreams" mentality (in the words of Terence Mann, AKA James Earl Jones: "build it and they'll come"). But the truth is that defining the product is just the beginning. Entrepreneurs must spend significant time thinking about the complexity of their sales process and the cost of customer acquisition, as these factors will strongly impact a company's ability to make money and attract investors. An obv... (more)