As millennials continue to rise up the ranks, a focus on great design and a delightful user experience will become even more important for software companies. As legendary UX expert Jakob Nielsen defines it, “user experience encompasses all aspects of the end user’s interaction with a company, its services and its products”. If you are a business owner or know a business owner, you know that one of the most important aspects of business for them is to maintain a good relationship with their customers and even prospective customers. Consistency is a good thing. Companies like g2crowd (my main point of reference here, although not my friend’s business) do a reasonably good job at controlling for these by requiring users to verify their identity by logging in through LinkedIn. That makes perfect sense, as being a “background service” might ultimately prove not to be a defensible, high-margin business. The GREAT thing about being a commission based salesperson online, and doing affiliate marketing, is the fact that we can use software to track the entire process.

It scores over manual testing by a large margin for its ability to process complex test cases innumerable times. Organizations should evaluate different use cases to know vendor centric capabilities that foster innovation. In any given category, the number of potential customers who considers (and in most cases prefers) a SaaS solution is much higher than it was some years ago. Now imagine that your SaaS solution allows your customers to get work done with significantly less people or maybe no people at all. As SaaS is quickly becoming the norm, it’s now much easier to get initial traction. A bit like an RSS aggregator, only that it’s not limited to RSS feeds. Finally, if there’s anything that I’m more excited about than the idea itself, it’s our team. What if future versions of sales automation software will not make your sales force more efficient but become your sales force?

What’s clear is that this disruptive force will create enormous opportunities for SaaS companies. A mobile-first SaaS app that truly leverages the smartphone’s camera, sensors and other applications to provide a 10x better user experience? An excellent user experience requires an elegant product that meets the needs of the customer and is a joy to use, but it goes beyond that. I’m somewhat skeptical if their (relatively) new “Paper” product will become a success. I’m exceedingly happy to announce Pageflakes, my new startup. How those consequences will look like, and if the net impact will be positive or negative for most people, is another extremely interesting topic that I’m not going to delve into here. It will be extremely interesting to see which companies can accomplish a similar quantum leap in 2017 and how it will look like. Adding in the two in-forms, it causes it to be difficult to get the credit card you would like and much more hard to make a price comparison. They don’t want to be just an icon in your file system, they want to unleash the world’s creative energy by designing a more enlightened way of working (Dropbox’s mission statement).

Marketing automation solutions don’t run by themselves. So keeping CIM may make sense just as a way to block competitors like IBM and SAS from using their own on-premise marketing automation systems to gain a foothold at Teradata accounts. Second, today more and more buying decisions are made by the actual users of the software (e.g. someone in marketing looking for a marketing automation solution) as opposed to the IT department. Get access to advanced options and granular control as you rebind buttons, assign macros, personalize device lighting and more. It will not replace my Blackberry or my 60GB iPOD video, but I can carry a third device – not because I need it – just because it is cool! You need to know who you’re selling to, what problem they’re trying to solve, and why they would buy a solution from you instead of somebody else. Then there is a need to monetize the content or data input of these clients.