It’s Christmas

It’s Christmas, just posting a joyful picture. Happy December tomorrow!

Subscribe to “Cash”?

At a business launch the other day, I made a “mouth-fart” stating that Service Providers, ISV or just vendors in general should consider “collecting money” in stead of “claiming money”. My point – people should subscribe to cash :).

In many European countries, there is a business service that automatically collect money for on-demand subscriptions such as utility power, phone bills etc. and making it easy for the providers to get rid of the collective cash-flow and angry customers for those interest rates we do add-on the bills for late payments.

What did I mean by Subscribe to “Cash”?
My point was: recurrent revenue stream companies are somewhat subscribing to cash. The beauty of recurrent revenue is you can predict next months income 90%; if you run a optimized and professional business (=churn). But the pitfall of those optimized business’ is exactly to get money at the invoice date, and not spend thousands of dollars in operational costs, to claim those. Service providers, SaaS companies and ISV companies should consider collection cash from payment services.

The problem to this, is there is no easy way. Corporate credit cards are not used in Europe and you rely on “if the country has a payment collection service”. Tip of the day: Business opportunity!

So – when you are in room with great friendship you can lauch of a wrong pronouncement, but reality is that I am often triggered by some of these thoughts in terms of changing the game/term.

Changing the Terms
Reality is many companies are to conservative in changing their business and adopting new procedures. Reality is we as human beings are reluctant to change – period! But any company vice president should book time with each segment of the company, to understand where and how to increase productivity, help customers remove barriers to consuming your product or understanding your sales process. Change is good. Change is great – if you can manage it probably.

“US Outsourcers to enter Europe”

Title from a news article on a Danish online news site (read it here). However odd it may seem, Europeans rush towards US and now it’s likely to turn the other way. The act and cause of confusion is a clear indication to me that the IT market is confused and very unclear where to capitalize in the current economy. Europe has for long been treated as the “last resort” so I wonder if these are the last strokes of desperate It ventures to seek capital and monetization on existing technology.

Cloud – Wasn’t it about global reach?
One thing seems odd to me though, as being in this climate. I evaluated nearly all solutions available in the market; from Amazon to Azure. From vCloud to Velocity. From SaasGrid to GoGrids, from Microsoft Dynamics Suite to Netsuite and from Google to Force. Many of these offer great online sales chat and customer reach in the US. But is asked if the technology is present in Europe the answer is – NO. So its striking me as very odd we now see many US entrants trying to leverage the opportunities in Europe. Of cause, we as Europeans has been a laugh to use the climate and window of opportunity. We are really bad at it! We are! I thought building core offerings and investing billions in technology and marketing when dealing with Cloud Computing was all about global reach and scale. However it seems that we never actually go for that global reach. US builders, build for US – and Europeans build for… sorry to realize it… the local country 😦 A true internationalize message is to lavage;

Think global, act local

US act us-local. Europe act … local-local! For a while I have been trying to establish a momentum to target the european market, but in this act and in this fight I was confronted with lack of support and energy to move the opportunity somewhere. Is this really what we as Europeans do?  Every time there is a war; we just lay down and shout for the US? And this is a war! This is currently as war of giants, and a corporate war to reach the next 6-12 years of growth in the IT market place.