Executive Luncheon: CFO’s & Technology Best Practices. Netsuite and 2nd Wind Fitness.

On October 29th 2008, Agosto held it’s first in a series of executive luncheons. The subject of this event was CFO’s and Technology Best Practices.  Tom Kelly of 2nd Wind Exercise Equipment presented NetSuite and how he transformed 2nd Wind’s operations through the use of key business applications delivered through SaaS.  Gary Pokorn from NetSuite also joined us to demonstrate and answer questions about the NetSuite platform.

If you missed the presentation, please contact Agosto for more information or watch the video below from the luncheon.

Thank you – Agosto.

Here is the slide presentation that Tom Kelly ran through. It’s hard to see the Tom’s slides in the video so click along using the presentation below.

The next Executive Luncheon in our series will have a featured speaker from Google. Tom Mills, Head of Midmarket Sales will be presenting Google and the Enterprise: How is Google changing the way businesses
use email, collaboration, and office applications?. There is limited availability for this event so sign up soon. Oh and yes lunch is included, come for the lunch stay for the education.

Register here for this event:

Register

More detail about this event:

Executive Luncheon – Google and the Enterprise

Google Video – Enterprise Video Sharing

Now that Google has launched Google Video, an enterprise youtube, as part of Google Apps, I can talk about the pilot that we’ve been running at 2nd Wind Exercise.  2nd Wind has 325 employees and over 100 locations across 9 states.  As one might imagine, training can be very difficult and expensive.  We participated in a pilot with Google Video to leverage a youtube-like private video sharing platform for sharing videos across the enterprise.  We’re publishing training videos, important corporate announcements, newly placed TV commercials and even some humorous content.  Since the interface is built off youtube.com, most users already know how to use the tool.  Here’s the video we shot for Google:

Aric Bandy

Google Apps – Has email become a commodity?

Has email become a commodity?   It depends who you ask.  For years Microsoft has had the market (62% of commercial email according to a recent Radicati Group analysis) believing that premise-based collaboration with all the bells and whistles was a requirement of a savvy business.  In fact, Microsoft would lead you to believe that email and collaboration is unique to each commercial entity when in fact almost every Exchange Server I’ve deployed has been homogeneous. 

 

We all have the same basic email and collaboration needs.  We need it to be available anywhere, it has to have ample storage, and we need to easily create and share content (docs, spreadsheets, etc.).  Google Apps provides these core features without all the fuss of more servers, software and licensing, and ongoing IT support.  Google Apps Premier includes Google Sites, Docs, Spreadsheets, Presentation, Postini SPAM filtering and security policies, GMail and Google Talk with 25Gb per user for $50 / user / year.  This approach to email and collaboration is gaining significant market share, even Microsoft has retooled their approach by launching Microsoft Live, a Google Apps approach to email and collaboration.   In the end, the commoditization of email helps us all – we get more features, better access and scalability and all for less money!   To find out more on SaaS email platforms please contact Agosto today.  

Aric Bandy