Marketing, Promotion & Sales Consulting for Business

IMB Enterprises, Inc., Huntington, NY 11746 +1 (631) 673-2929, imblonder@imbenterprises.com

Pivot Continuously While Avoiding Hard Pivots or No Pivots At All

Two software businesses once known as leading examples of the NoSQL tech theme made the news over the last couple of weeks -- MapR & NewRelic. HPE announced they had purchased the intellectual assets of MapR on August 5th. The treasure enticing HPE? "...artificial intelligence and machine learnin...

Ira Michael Blonder
8 days ago

How engaged are SaaS users? (the Microsoft variety)

In a story written by Angus Loten, titled "Microsoft's Focus on Big Customers Propels Cloud Sales", published on July 23, 2019 by the Wall Street Journal, the writer concludes Microsoft's pace of signing up tenants for its productivity cloud -- formerly known as Office 365 and, now, more commonly...

Ira Michael Blonder
2 weeks ago

Platforms are an especially powerful deterrent to customer churn

The holy grail of most businesses is recurring revenue. Comparatively low touch sales, in the form of software renewals, provide a soothing balm to the wounds a business incurs winning a beachhead with a big customer. The computer hardware and software businesses exhibit this same characteristic....

Ira Michael Blonder
3 weeks ago

Apple’s release of iOS 12.4 didn’t go well for everyone

On Monday, July 22nd 2019 we experienced a major problem with our iPhone & iPad (both running iOS 12.3.x). A message appeared on the screen of our iPad Air II prompting us we would need to change our passcode within the next 59 minutes. We proceeded to act on the message to our peril. End result?...

Ira Michael Blonder
4 weeks ago

Microsoft debuts Azure Data Share Preview

On July 11, 2019 Mike Flasko, Director of Program Management, Information Management & Governance for Microsoft published "Announcing Preview of Azure Data Share"". As Eldert Grootenboer writes for Infoq Azure Data Share "...provides [organizations] capabilities to share data [internally], as wel...

Ira Michael Blonder
4 weeks ago

Choosing People Types for User Acceptance Testing

During the week of July 14, 2019 a news story came up illustrating the importance of choosing the "right" people for user acceptance testing (UAT) prior to software release into production. On Wednesday, July 17th, the New York Times published a story written by Brian X. Chen - The Sad Truth Abou...

Ira Michael Blonder
a month ago

Exploitation and Exploration – a Modern Spin on Hunters and Farmers

In their book Lead and Disrupt: How to Solve the Innovator's Dilemma, Charles A. O'Reilly (Professor of Organizational Behavior at Stanford Graduate School of Business) and Michael Tushman present a number of case studies of "ambidextrous" managers running organizations built on "exploitation and...

Ira Michael Blonder
a month ago

Fear of Missing Out (FOMO)

A lot of what an enterprise software sales team does with leads depends on qualification. Deciding which leads to pursue requires sales people to successfully use qualifiers. The most promising of these is some version of "this prospect's job to be done is something my product can do and the job ...

Ira Michael Blonder
a month ago

Apple’s latest iPhone designs shut the door on what may be a significant market segment

A tour through your local Apple Store can be an educational experience -- if you're interested in consumer tech commodities ("smart phones"), markets, and consumer interests. I took one in the middle of July, 2019 and spent most of my time on the iPhone tables comparing the size of my smartphone ...

Ira Michael Blonder
a month ago

Avoid the Seduction of Hidden Needs and Captive Markets

Early stage technology businesses often come about as what looks like a natural progression of leadership's experience with specific markets. Often the entrepreneur has spent time working with one computing paradigm-for example: enterprise collaboration. Market perception of the entrepreneur's ex...

Ira Michael Blonder
a month ago