Two of my favorite blogs are written by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz (founders of the new VC firm Andreessen-Horowitz). Both individuals have impressive track records building companies and investing in the next big thing at just the right time. Ben Horowitz recently wrote a post titled, “Hiring Executives: If You’ve Never Done the Job, How Do You Hire Somebody Good?”

While this post offers great advice, such as, […]

ITI discusses at length the four “Ps” of strategy- perspective, position, plan and pattern, each of which represents a different way to approach your service strategy.  Brief summaries are provided here and refer to Chapter 3 of the service strategy book for more details.

– Perspective is your vision and direction for the services you will provide, and is attained through conversations with your stakeholders.

The challenges IT departments face today are many — from providing system uptime in line with ever-increasing expectations, to lowering costs while maintaining high service quality, to shifting from a pure operations mode to one of driving innovation and creating new services.  IT is being asked to not only do more with less, it is being asked to deliver it more quickly, cost-effectively, and accurately— and to a broader audience.

If you are a running a business, you know how important it is to retain customers. It is very often cheaper to retain an existing customer then to acquire a new one.

In this article I will share my experience of retaining customers as a software as a service (SaaS) company. The lessons learned can be applied to any company, not only to SaaS vendors.