Fred Teekens

Nov. 30,2021 | CRM, Marketing, CMS

CRM and Marketing Disruption: Rapid Changing client behavior (initiated by COVID-19) and less physical interaction, required additional means to connect to prospects and grow your business. If you are not doing it your competition will, and companies are loading up on technology to help them achieve this. The problem is, that many companies are loading up and buying the wrong products, at the wrong price, for reasons that are not shared across the enterprise. General Situation: Most Organizations have a CRM (Salesforce, Oracle, SugarCRM, Hubspot etc.) and one of the many Marketing automation tools, but lack the customer knowledge in order to ...

Tjeerd Edelman

Nov. 30,2021 | Software, Microsoft

Prior to establishing Microsoft, Gates and Allen had already formed another company while they were both still students at a high school in Seattle. They designed a computer system that automatically processed traffic counting data called Traf-O-Data. The aim of this was to read the raw data that was produced by roadway traffic counters and transform these into reports for traffic engineers. Apparently, they had a limited amount of success with the company, but it helped them to develop the computer programming skills that was instrumental in founding Microsoft. It also gave them the opportunity to develop their business skills, turning ...

Philippe Anav

Nov. 29,2021 | SaaS, Cloud, Azure, AWS, google, Cloud Negotiation

Cloud spend is anticipated to continue its massive growth trajectory for the foreseeable future. However, the spend does not have to match that same growth curve! To help our Clients maintain sound Cloud Optimization programs, we've assembled a series of articles and tips called: 12 for '21 Cloud Optimization Series (note: request a download of all 21 here). Today we review the fourth installment in the series: Set Up Hierarchical Storage Management. Data sets have specific lifecycles. Early on, your workload might often access the data. But overtime, data access, in particular the aging one, drops drastically. Some data remains idle in the ...

Michael Welsh

Oct. 27,2021 | SaaS, Microsoft, Procurement, SAP, IBM, Oracle, Supplier Management, SSM - Strategic Supplier Management, CFO, Workday, Infrastructure, Cisco, Amazon, google, CCO

As we've been saying for months, post (hopefully) pandemic Market Conditions are ripe for you to act in driving business value into your company. If you've ever dreamed of being the budget hero, this is it. With the tumult in the supplier marketplace around M&As, shifts of products to the cloud, small company disruptions, the supplier competition has never been as robust. Once you digest the list below and want more, we're happy to talk. There's nothing we like better than chatting about how to get more value from technology suppliers - especially now. Big Software SAP Nearly 100% of SAP deals come due in December. This is driven by ...

Steven Zolman

Oct. 27,2021 | Procurement, Audit, Supplier Management, Negotiation, CFO, Cloud

‘The Most Wonderful Time of the Year’ is a popular holiday song and was written by Edward Pola and George Wyle in 1963. It was popularized in North America by singer Andy Williams that same year on his television show by the same name. However, we didn’t have to do much research to learn that the inspiration for that song had nothing to do with the 4th quarter for most business leaders and their respective companies. Anecdotally, we believe most business leaders might say it’s the most *stressful* time of the year, especially for publicly traded companies – most of whom have their fiscal year end aligned with the calendar year end of ...

Philippe Anav

Oct. 25,2021 | Cloud, Amazon, AWS, google, CCO, GCP

Cloud spend is anticipated to continue its massive growth trajectory for the foreseeable future. However, the spend does not have to match that same growth curve! To help our Clients maintain sound Cloud Optimization programs, we've assembled a series of articles and tips called: 12 for '21 Cloud Optimization Series (note: request a download of all 21 here). Today we review the fourth installment in the series: Reserve Your Instance In exchange for an upfront commitment of 1 or 3 years, AWS (“ Reserved instances”), Microsoft Azure (‘Reserved Savings’) and GCP (‘Commitment Price’] offer significant cost savings (anywhere from ~29% up to 72%) ...

Michael Welsh

Sep. 28,2021 | Software, Cognitive Transformation, Supplier Management, SSM - Strategic Supplier Management, Telecommunications, Operations, Negotiation, CFO, Digital Transformation, Hardware, Infrastructure, Savings Cloud

Like a party no one wanted to go to, the COVID pandemic dragged many IT Executives into (over) spending on technology that was not planned for. In the frenetic pace to ‘keep the lights on’, expenditures were made without the scrutiny they may have normally received pre-COVID. Supporting all the work from anywhere (WFA) initiatives including conferencing, PCs, and remote access software and hardware were all added to the mission critical initiatives already underway, like digital transformation and cloud migrations siphoning money away from those other priorities. As you start planning for your 2022 budgets, you may just now be realizing and ...

Philippe Anav

Sep. 28,2021 | Cloud, Amazon, AWS, google, CCO, GCP

Cloud spend is anticipated to continue its massive growth trajectory for the foreseeable future. However, the spend does not have to match that same growth curve! To help our Clients maintain sound Cloud Optimization programs, we've assembled a series of articles and tips called: 12 for '21 Cloud Optimization Series (note: request a download of all 12 here). AWS, Azure and GCP offer data storage services that include a range of options in term of cost and performance. You can choose from several different storage classes (and pricing) depending on how frequently the data will be accessed, how long you need to store the data, and the ...

Philippe Anav

Sep. 17,2021

While the scalability, flexibility and efficiency of cloud infrastructure yield undeniable benefits, there are some rather large pitfalls that must be avoided with Cloud Agreements. The complexity of dynamic consumption, broad range of providers’ features and its workload applicability, are challenges to recognize early on to capitalize on your cloud investments and avoid value leakage along the way. Generally, any and all of the scenarios below are encountered by our corporate clients during their cloud lifecycle: Early stage: You are at the start of your cloud adoption and unsure if an enterprise (or ‘ private pricing’) agreement is the ...

Scott Braden

Sep. 9,2021 | Software, SaaS, Microsoft

Microsoft has a long history of confusing customers with multiple pricing models and several different agreement types. With Cloud services, some of that has been simplified on the surface, but still leaves customers typically paying more (not less) over time. Microsoft really is not in business to help their customers spend less on Microsoft, but we are. In that spirit, as many of you already know, Microsoft announced new global price increases set to go into effect March 1, 2022. In addition to the 365 increases, there are other important changes coming to their CSP (Cloud Solution Provider) partner programs that could also impact your ...