Control your own destiny when it comes to EOL of your packages
A recent Rimini Street survey says that in spite of the announced 2025 end of life for core applications in SAP Business Suite 7 ERP product and older versions, “Of the IT leaders surveyed, two-thirds state they either have no plans to migrate to S/4HANA (35%) or are undecided about moving to S/4HANA (32%) ” IDC, on […]
Zoho’s strikingly different global path
I have heard Zoho talk about doing business in UAE and Nigeria. That is so different from other cloud vendors which tend to mostly focus on N. America and Europe. Over the last decade, their US revenues have steadily declined to now about 40%. Not because the US, is not growing, because other regions have […]
The IFS-Acumatica-EQT “powerhouse”?
Part of me is excited by the announcement that EQT, the private equity investor in IFS is also buying Acumatica. I have been saying for a while even after two decades of cloud applications, there are shockingly few operational applications for manufacturing and other industrial markets. But the announcement also has me asking “so what?” The good […]
Appearance on the Twenty Minute VC: Financing Thoughts, The Private Equity Sales Process, and More
Famed venture capital podcaster and now venture capitalist at StrideVC, Harry Stebbings, released a new episode of the Twenty Minute VC podcast with me as his guest. (iTunes version here.) Harry’s interview was broad-ranging, covering a number of topics including: Financing lessons I’ve learned during prior bubble periods and, perhaps more importantly, bubble bursts. The […]
Workfront – Modern Work, Modern Markets
Many vendors talk about the “Future of Work”. It’s usually in the future tense. They forget that the future is already here. The BLS adds many brand new occupations in its listings every few years. We glibly talk about the “gig economy” when in many cases 70 to 80% of corporate talent is already on […]
The Rule of 40 — Down, But Not Out!
Neeraj Agrawal and Logan Bartlett of Battery Ventures recently published the 2019 version of its outstanding annual software round-up report. I highly recommend this report — it’s 78-pages chock full of great data about topics like: Why Battery is long software overall The four eras of software evolution The five forces driving software’s accelerating growth […]
The Oracle Enigma
Rimini Street recently conducted a survey of Oracle customers. Oracle and Rimini have long been in litigation, so I would read the results with a nuanced viewpoint, but it does not paint the picture of a very happy Oracle Nation. As an analyst, I am particularly interested in products and competitive positioning. One of the more […]
My Final Verdict on Multi-Year, Prepaid Deals
After years of experience with and thinking about multi-year, prepaid SaaS deals, my mental jury is back in the box and the verdict is in: don’t do them. Why? Multi-year, prepaid deals: Are not the norm, so they raise eyebrows among investors and can backfire with customers [1]. Complexify SaaS metrics. SaaS businesses are hard […]
Workday: The Power of Focus
kept thinking of Southwest Airlines while I was at the Workday Innovation Summit in CA last week. I had read this tribute to the legendary founder, Herb Kelleher on the flight over and it reminded me how revered he was – like Dave Duffield of Workday is in HCM circles. Then, a walk down memory lane took […]
Drama in enterprise computing
Ray Lane, a top-notch tech executive and investor over decades, said this about my new book “Don’t be fooled by the title—the book is not just about SAP. It’s about drama in enterprise computing.” I then used “drama” in the title of my recent ZDNet guest column. Drama? That’s what you get in Augusta in April. Isn’t […]
