12th International Cloud Expo, held on June 10–13, 2013 at the Javits Center in New York City, featured four content-packed days with a rich array of sessions about the business and technical value of cloud computing led by exceptional speakers from every sector of the cloud computing ecosystem.
The Cloud Expo series is the fastest-growing Enterprise IT event in the past 10 years, devoted to every aspect of delivering massively scalable enterprise IT as a service.
Are You Making Enough of Your Sales Online?
Do you want customers to buy online or offline? Parallels experience working with service providers shows a high percentage of small business hosting plan purchases are made on the phone talking to a living, breathing salesperson. Depending on the type of service provider, as few as 10% of direct channel sales by small businesses are via online purchase with up to 70% being made “offline” – via inbound phone calls – and the remainder being outbound campaign sales to existing customers. To be sure, these “offline” purchases are driven by online content. SMBs call after reviewing the service provider website. Research done through our SMB Cloud Insights report series reveals that for SaaS applications, for example, an SMB’s own online research is their number one source of information with more than 60% of SMBs citing it.
If that’s the case, why are so few hosting plan purchases by SMBs made online? Typically it is because of services discoverability issues on the website and the natural tendency for a generally non-technical buyer to need reassurance before pulling the trigger.
But if your goal is to increase the number of purchases your SMB customers make online because you want to spend less on your call center staffing, what can you do? One area to investigate is your buying and checkout experience. The Baymard Institute does an unusual annual study related to customer checkout experience. They take users and watch them go through the checkout processes of 15 different popular e-commerce sites. What they discover from this is general principles around usability-related issues due to poor checkout design and how that increases customer abandon rates.
Their findings are massive but touching on a few high level items might help get you pointed in the right direction.
+ The top reasons for checkout abandonment:
– Extra cost (shipping, tax, fees) 33%
– Forced account creation 23%
– Credit card trust 18%
– Complicated checkout process 18%
You may say that the top two don’t apply to service providers. But the study found it wasn’t so much the charging of extra fees, for example, as it was the confusing way it was presented or explained.
+ A disruptive problem with copywriting: Try to avoid technical jargon – think about who your audience is. That’s an obvious one, right? Here’s one that isn’t so obvious on the copywriting front and it is even more harmful: Not having descriptions for form field labels. In many cases what may seem obvious to you (“Address line 2”) will make no sense to some of your potential customers and in other cases what is obvious makes buyers balk (“Email address”) because they need an explanation of why you need that information (“To communicate with you – we never sell your email address”).
+ A layout problem: Unclear error indications. This is the most harmful issue related to layout. If buyers can’t find the error on the form or don’t understand it there is a very high probability they will abandon the checkout process. This is especially true if they can’t find the error and submit the form again only to have it rejected yet again. In those situations they think the problem is a bug on your site. Ouch.
So while you may always have a high rate of “offline” purchases just because it’s the nature of the beast with this type of customer and product, you might want to take a look at your online checkout experience to see if it’s as buyer-friendly as you need it to be.
Scott Fallon, Senior Director, Partner Marketing
GreenButton to Exhibit at Cloud Expo Silicon Valley
SYS-CON Events announced today that GreenButton, the leading provider of compute intensive, on-demand cloud solutions for private and public clouds, will exhibit at SYS-CON’s 13th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on November 4–7, 2013, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
GreenButton delivers turnkey solutions for cloud-enablement, data synchronization and bursting to the cloud without the need for recoding. We enable enterprises, independent software vendors (ISVs) and service providers to cost effectively leverage the cloud. GreenButton™ Cloud Fabric, GreenButton Mission Control and CloudSync solutions empower users across any industry such as biotech, digital media, energy, engineering, financial services and others to leverage our rapid enablement of vertical applications to virtualized on-demand infrastructure. GreenButton’s solutions are managed from a simple web based interface.
GreenButton to Exhibit at Cloud Expo Silicon Valley
SYS-CON Events announced today that GreenButton, the leading provider of compute intensive, on-demand cloud solutions for private and public clouds, will exhibit at SYS-CON’s 13th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on November 4–7, 2013, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
GreenButton delivers turnkey solutions for cloud-enablement, data synchronization and bursting to the cloud without the need for recoding. We enable enterprises, independent software vendors (ISVs) and service providers to cost effectively leverage the cloud. GreenButton™ Cloud Fabric, GreenButton Mission Control and CloudSync solutions empower users across any industry such as biotech, digital media, energy, engineering, financial services and others to leverage our rapid enablement of vertical applications to virtualized on-demand infrastructure. GreenButton’s solutions are managed from a simple web based interface.
Cloud Expo 2013 Silicon Valley Call for Papers Deadline August 31
Despite the economy, cloud computing is doing well. Gartner estimates the cloud market will double by 2016 to $206 billion. The time for dabbling in the cloud is over!
The 13th International Cloud Expo, to be held November 4-7, 2013, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA, announces that its Call for Papers is now open. Topics include all aspects of providing or using massively scalable IT-related capabilities as a service using Internet technologies (see suggested topics below).
Flourishing ARM Server Market Creates Opportunity – for Software
ARM-based Servers are poised to shake up the traditional Server market. This will also shake up the software market – creating opportunity for new vendors who choose to specialize in delivering solutions for this emerging computing platform.
«There’s a new class of technologies poised to shake up the Server market – the Microserver, sometimes called the ARM Server. But the Microserver will do more than shake up the X86 server market. It is going to shake up the software market as well.» That’s the message software and technology executive Chris Piedmonte, CEO and founder of Austin, TX-based Suvola Corporation delivered as we discussed the topic over coffee earlier this week.
OMB’s Evidence Memo: A Call for Cloud Services Brokerage
n a late July memo the Office of Management and Budget requested cloud services brokerage.
Well, not in so many words.
Rather, OMB requested increased use of evidence in 2015 budget proposals and in evaluation of existing programs to, in the words of agency leadership, “continually improve program performance by applying existing evidence about what works generating new knowledge and using experimentation and innovation to test new approaches to program delivery.”
The memo is part of the administration’s ongoing evidenced-based initiative to better use analytics to evaluate outcomes of dollars spent.
All of which makes sense. With the ebb tide of sequestration causing federal IT budgets to continue to recede, Uncle Sam’s wallet is more cobwebs than cash. This means every dollar spent must be carefully indexed for performance.
SugarCRM Reports Continued Rapid Growth; New Social, Mobile, Cloud Offerings
“Unlike conventional CRM systems, Sugar is designed for the individual user first, and what they need to engage successfully one-to-one with their customers,» said Larry Augustin, CEO of SugarCRM, as he today announced that the company has achieved 15 consecutive quarters of growth and increased annual recurring revenue by more than 30 % year-over-year in the second quarter of 2013.
SugarCRM Reports Continued Rapid Growth; New Social, Mobile, Cloud Offerings
“Unlike conventional CRM systems, Sugar is designed for the individual user first, and what they need to engage successfully one-to-one with their customers,» said Larry Augustin, CEO of SugarCRM, as he today announced that the company has achieved 15 consecutive quarters of growth and increased annual recurring revenue by more than 30 % year-over-year in the second quarter of 2013.
IBM vs AWS federal cloud war steps up a notch with Amazon lawsuit
It’s been one of the biggest stories of the summer. The battle for a lucrative CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) cloud computing contract between IBM and Amazon has featured attack, counter-attack, and all manner of legalistic name-calling as the two giants battle out for federal cloud supremacy.
While most of the talk has been in the sanctity of legal offices, a lawsuit from Amazon against the Federal Government, made public this week, reveals the true extent of the imbroglio.
The story so far: the CIA initially awarded its $600m private cloud contract to AWS back in Febuary. IBM, not surprisingly, protested against this, as reported by FCW in May.
In June, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) published a report examining both sides of the argument and, whilst admitting that Amazon’s offer was at the time “the best value” and a “superior technical solution”, made the can-of-worm-opening recommendation that the …