Long Journey Home

UPDATE #5 – The End Spent last week in Toronto for Microsoft’s annual Worldwide Partner Conference (more of that in other posts), but rather than fly back to Australia straight away, some of us decided to pop down to New York for a few days over the weekend. Had a great time. Stayed at the …

BPOS Health Status dashboard

(Stephen Parker, Head of Cloud Strategy) Following the recent embarrassing down time for BPOS services Microsoft are now offering a Health Status Dashboard.  Morgan Cole the man who “leads the team at Microsoft whose mission is to make sure that BPOS customers have a great experience” explains about the dashboard and thinking behind it here. …

Exit planning for Cloud Services

Been a long, tiring but very enjoyable month.  I have been down in Australia targeting new business opportunities for “Cloud” consulting and as I get ready to return to the UK I am left feeling very positive. One area that I discussed with a number of organisations (whether they be buyers or suppliers) was the …

People in Glass Houses

The recent Cloud* outages for Air New Zealand / IBM and T-Mobile / Sidekick / Danger / Microsoft are clearly a wake up call for the emerging Cloud industry.  Having sailed close to the edge as a Cloud startup I am only too aware about how harsh customers can be and how quickly we had …

Cloud Computing Books

Been busy over the past few months capturing experiences from the last hmmmm years about the internet/SaaS/Cloud and putting them into a couple of books: Thinking of…Buying a Cloud Solution? Ask the Smart Questions and Thinking of…Offering a Cloud Solution? Ask the Smart Questions The idea behind these books is that if you are currently …

Mont Blanc – great customer service (story #3)

What is going on?  Third time in as many weeks that I am compelled to talk about a company that has offered great service.  Is this a general trend that reflects how good companies are showing their customer service colours during these challenging times? (Please let this be true) Is it my non confrontational approach …

Continental Airways – Great customer service (story #2)

Following my previous post about great customer service at Honda I offer a second example this time from Continental Airways.   I have just been out in New Orleans for the annual Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC09) and ended up travelling with Continental from London Heathrow to New Orleans via Houston (there are no direct …

Honda – great customer service (story #1)

In the past few days I have experienced two examples of great customer service and on the basis that too many people complain and not enough say “thank you” here is my story regarding Honda:   =  Happiness We purchased a Honda CRV (1 year old) as an approved car from a Honda dealer in …

Interesting to many, essential to few

I offer this as a simple tag line to the malaise that many telco’s find themselves in when it comes to positioning their web based (SaaS) offerings.  With business models designed to assess the viability of multi million dollar infrastructure investments with long term pay backs it is not surprising that the natural approach when …

Blog left to fend for itself again

Been stupidly busy over the past few months and this blog has been the soft option to ignore.  What with building out the Smart Questions business and getting everything ready for MS WPC (more about that in another post), working out in The Netherlands for a month and a half, a week in New Orleans …