The New Microsoft?
I have watched Microsoft's efforts in the cloud over the past couple of years and have been impressed by the success that they have had with Azure. A new Gartner Magic Quadrant came out on public cloud storage and Microsoft is in the leaders quadrant. This isn't really a surprise but they were also recently in the leaders quadrant for another important cloud service, Enterprise Application Platform as a Service where they share the space with Salesforce.com. They are also in the leaders quadrant along with AWS for public cloud infrastructure as a service as I mentioned last month. Although they are not #1 in any of these they are #2 in all three making them a strong contender whenever you look at cloud services. There are many other magic quadrants where Microsoft is in the leaders or visionary quadrant. In fact here is a list of all the magic quadrants where Microsoft is included. The list of applications, cloud services and tools is impressive. Seems to me like there is a new Microsoft!
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Customer Community Tools
Customer communities are a very important part of the SaaS business model. They help with attracting new customers, supporting and retaining existing customers and in general providing the day to day and week by week information needed to effectively use the product. Of course, a tool is needed to effectively manage the community and Forrester has released a new wave report on the these tools which they call social depth platforms. A free copy of the report can be obtained here. Of course the most important piece is how these tools are used and implemented but the right tool is the place to start.
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