James Colgan

Interlaken is the name of a very picturesque town in Switzerland (pictured), but it’s also the name of the next communications protocol that will be driving a cloud near you! Maybe the fact that Interlaken, the town, sits between two huge lakes in the Alps is what inspired the name of the protocol. Think of the lakes as huge pools of data that needs to move from one lake to another. You get the idea. Chip-to-chip bandwidth is one of the major bottlenecks in cloud computing as the amount of data that needs to be moved around increases incessantly. Cisco and Cortina Systems recognized the need in 2006 and announced the protocol.  The two companies joined with Silicon Logic Engineering (now part of Open-Silicon) in 2007, and put out an Interlaken Technology White Paper. The whitepaper summarizes the protocol, “Interlaken is an interconnect protocol optimized for highb... (more)

Health Care Companies Moving to the Cloud

Reading an article by Cloud prognosticator David Linthicum, we were very happy to see another market move aggressively towards the cloud. According to the research collected by Markets and Markets,  the cloud computing market in the health care sector is expected to grow to $5.4 billion by 2017. While privacy and security are still cited as reasons to be cautious, users of the cloud are finding security models and technology that they can use today in the cloud. Here is the key paragraph that relates to every industry out there: “Most IT organizations in the health care sector do... (more)

Step by Step Way to Use LinkedIn for Lead Generation

There’s a useful check-list blog post by Pamela Vaughan on hubspot that lists up “6 Ways to Use LinkedIn for Lead Generation“: Participate in LinkedIn Answers Add LinkedIn Applications Join LinkedIn Groups Conduct a LinkedIn People Search Experiment with LinkedIn Direct Ads Try LinkedIn Mobile Expanding upon step #3, here is a step-by-step process for quickly engaging with the LinkedIn community and finding out what works and what doesn’t. 1. Create a Target Customer Profile You should be doing this as your basic go-to-market operation.  Who are your customers and what do they ... (more)

Lead Generation and Qualification Case Study

A traditional method of generating leads is to attend an industry focused trade show. This is extremely useful to not only generate leads, but also to qualify them. With a brief conversation a seasoned sales professional can quickly ascertain the prospects propensity to buy. However, software sales professionals need cost effective ways to generate and qualify prospects year round and globally. The best way to do that is to have your software available on the cloud for prospects to try out for themselves, with just the use of their browser. Data gathered while the prospect uses ... (more)

Turning a Contact into a Qualified Lead

There is no shortage of ways to get a contact at a prospective account.  In the off-line world there are traditional and still powerful techniques such as partner or customer referrals and attendance at trade shows.  On-line we can connect through LinkedIn or Facebook.  We can perform an email marketing campaign.  Alternatively our storefront to the internet, our website, can provide us with contact information to follow up on. Qualification the Hard Way Once the contact has been collected you need to judge their propensity to buy your software.  Tracking that contacts behavior on... (more)