"In hindsight, the decision turned out to be something of a no-brainer,
says Anthony King, CIO for the medical diagnostics equipment manufacturer. "SaaS
beats the alternative in maintenance, training, user flexibility and several
other key areas," he says.
As the leading magazine for the CIO, I'm often surprised how uninterested CIO
Magazine has been in SaaS. To read some other tech publications, one might
think that SaaS has already taken...
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Interview with a Financial Services Client, 03/06/2007 10:28:44 AM
We love this type of interview. This is one of the best intranets I've seen - the one for New Century Financial. KM World interviewed our client, Michelle Cullinan.
http://www.kmworld.com/Articles/ReadArticle.aspx?ArticleID=18971
Jim Howard
CEO
more...
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Google Apps for a Fee, 02/26/2007 3:00:00 PM
Google is making their (obvious) next move at replacing Microsoft as the
dominant player in the OS and desktop tool market. They are charging for
business-versions of their services, including Gmail, calendar, IM and "Start
Page" - their site builder feature.It's an interesting set of competitors they have for these services. Yahoo
and Microsoft offer them, of course. So does every Tom, Dick and Harry web
hosting provider. Netsuite is flirting with these tools and...
more...
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Landing Pages, 02/20/2007 2:12:06 PM
I see so few good landing pages, it makes me wonder if nobody paid attention
to the online retailers. Google is making a zillion dollars a minute
with people buying keywords and paying for clicks. It amazes me that
nobody seems to care about their landing pages. Is that just because
it's a pain to create, test, and manage them, or is it because everybody is
still amazed that they are getting leads online? "Yeah, boss. We
got 3 leads last week and it only cost $2,000." Soon,...
more...
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"Tending Your CMS Garden" In CMSWatch, 02/13/2007 3:00:00 PM
I wrote an article for CMSWatch that I had originally titled, "Life After Launch." I worked with Tony Byrne on the article and we adjusted the article to include the metaphor of a garden that needs to be tended after planting. The article is now titled "Tending Your CMS Garden." Tony always makes my articles much better (although less self-serving). This case was true to form.
I would have loved to hammer the point home that a SaaS delivers better support...
more...
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SEO and CMS, 02/06/2007 11:45:36 AM
This is one of the best articles I've seen on CMS in a long time. The best (only) I've ever seen on SEO and CMS.http://www.cmswatch.com/Feature/150-SEO-and-Your-CMS
Jim Howard
CEO
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5 Reasons CMS Projects Will Typically Fail, 01/22/2007 4:32:57 PM
I've been in this business a long time and have seen a lot of companies implement and use their CMS successfully, but unfortunately this is not always the case: 5. You'll pull a Frankenstein: You'll attempt the unholy
mix of document management, business process management, e-commerce, and web publishing. Each solution is for different projects and teams with different requirements.
4. You'll make a token gesture at training:
You won't train the end-users...
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Controversial Topic, This SaaS Thing!, 12/18/2006 11:28:05 AM
I recently did an interview with Phil Waineright of ZDNet. The topic of the interview was "10 Myths in SaaS". His title for the article was
"IT is Afraid of SaaS". Ouch! It created a pretty strong
reaction, as you can imagine.
http://blogs.zdnet.com/SAAS/?p=196#more-196
There was so much reaction that Phil wrote a follow-up article,...
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Sometimes with landing pages - less is more, 10/16/2006 11:21:53 AM
This was a really interesting article we found on imedia connection (www.imediaconnection.com). So many times when you're creating landing pages - and strategizing on how to make them most effective - the urge to put too much information on the page can outweigh good design.
This article provides proof positive that some times less is more.
more...
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Don't Even Think About Commercial Software or Open Source!, 10/5/2006 9:16:47 AM
Content
Management
Systems exist to enable people to manage web sites.
However, in a horrible
and almost never discussed twist, most content
management implementations only
help people to update content.
They fail utterly to enable rapid
changes to the web site
itself. CrownPeak enables our customers
to update
content - of course - but also to continually change and upgrade
their web sites. Content management systems...
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CrownPeak: The Growth Years, 10/4/2006 10:21:06 PM
By the time we
had
secured our first fifty customers, things really took off.
Our recurring
revenue paid for all of our operations, and every new
customer meant more money
for sales, marketing, and product
development.
In our third
and
fourth years, we launched two new products. Site search and
RSS
management. We also added more CMS functionality than
anybody else
out there during that time. We continued to grow
very...
more...
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Our Pledge, 10/4/2006 5:18:09 PM
OK, this may
sound
corny, but at CrownPeak we actually have a philosophy and a
pledge (in addition
to our SLA, which is sort-of a legally binding
pledge we offer as part of
our standard agreement -- more on
our SLA later). Here is our
philosophy. I'll write about
our pledge in a later posting.
We believe
that our customers should get everything required to manage large and
sophisticated web sites for less than the cost of a...
more...
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Why and How We Started CrownPeak: The Early Days, 10/3/2006 4:19:52 PM
We are about
to finish
our sixth year. Today, we
are the leaders in the content management
SaaS market, and are one of the
fastest growing, yet most stable and
predictable software companies in the
US.
Back at the
end of
1999, the founders of CrownPeak sat down to with this goal in
mind: fix content
management. At that time, the market was almost
exclusively big packages:
Vignette & Interwoven, most
conspicuously. ...
more...
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How to tell an SaaS from a “hosting partner” or a false SaaS, 10/1/2006 9:22:06 AM
If you work
with an
ASP or another version of a "false SaaS", you are likely to
wind up in trouble
because critical things that an SaaS does naturally
won't be included. A
true SaaS provides upgrades, support on the
application itself - not just the
hardware and
network, troubleshooting, documentation on the product, an SLA
guaranteeing service levels on everything - not just the network, a
commitment
to the product, and most importantly - adjustments to the...
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How to Contract with a Software as a Service, 09/28/2006 10:35:27 AM
Here are the
most
important questions to ask.
* How long is
the
term?
* Under what
conditions can we get out of the contract?
* Do we pay
monthly or
annually?
* Is there a
price
break for doing a longer/shorter contract?
* Will you
guarantee
our service representative? Can we meet him/her before
we
sign?
* Can we
speak with
other clients that service representative has?
* Are the...
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Why a customer is better off buying a service from CrownPeak than they would be buying a great application that they manage., 09/25/2006 9:36:43 AM
Is your
objective is
to solve web content management for the next 6 months or
the next 5 years?
If the answer if 5 or more
years, buy from
us.
Let’s assume
that
CrownPeak and an installed solution have similar functionality and
interfaces,
and that each is well implemented and the end-users are
well trained.
Here’s where the difference comes. One year
out, there will have been 5
major changes to the web site and about a
dozen...
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The CrownPeak Pledge, 09/21/2006 9:23:54 AM
This is a
work in
progress. Our pledge came from our people - this is what
our employees
have pledged to provide to our customers:
We pledge
that we will be there when you call (and/or respond right
away).
We pledge
that, by hiring CrownPeak, our customers will have the best technology
and tools
on the market, delivered in a completely reliable way, fully
supported and fully
managed.
We pledge to
deliver an economical and...
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Why CrownPeak is IT's best friend, 09/20/2006 4:39:39 AM
Our whole
reason
for being as a company is to provide a service that
works for our
customers. Our customers have full developer access
to our suite of tools
if they want it.
Many of our
customers
want us to get the initial system going and then work with
their team to adjust
the system over time. Others want CrownPeak
to handle all of the
development. Still others are developers who
can do the all system
configuration and...
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TCO and SaaS, 09/15/2006 5:40:48 AM
Basically the
TCO
equation should be a "no-brainer", when comparing a software as a
service
against an installed application or an open source tool.
Owning software
is like owning a boat. The cheapest part is
buying it.
In brief, the
cost
comparison goes this way:
CrownPeak
costs
$3k/month for the software and all of management, maintenance,
upgrades and
support of the software. We include a service level
agreement...
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Security, 09/10/2006 9:41:59 AM
We have all
sorts of
information on our security practices and procedures.
Here’s the bottom line: We spend more time, effort and money on
security than any IT organization would possibly consider for an
application of
this type.
In other
words – we
are very secure. As or more secure
than any
other system of this type out there. Just a few of the elements we can
discuss in detail with any customer:
Tier 1...
more...
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