New ARR and CAC in Price-Ramped vs. Auto-Expanding Deals
In this post we’re going to look at the management accounting side of multi-year SaaS deals that grow in value over time. I’ve been asked about this a few times lately, less because people value my accounting knowledge [1] but rather because people are curious about the CAC impact of such deals and how to […]
Where have all the process visionaries gone?
A recent visit to an Amazon Fulfillment Center was eye-opening. They have completely redefined the old warehouse pick, pack, ship mindset. It’s now stow, pick, pack, verify, and in their lingo, SLAM and “chaotic storage”. Kiva robots and miles of conveyor belts bring work to employees not the other way round. Scanners, scales, sensors monitor […]
What really is “Go-to-Market”?
The single most bastardized, watered-down term in the business of enterprise tech is “Go-to-Market”. Go-to-Market (GTM) gets bandied about as the cure-all to everything from missing 2 sequential quarters to losing critical deals to a single competitor, to seeing a tepid uptick in demand, to my least favorite – a one-time effort to coordinate activities […]
Cloud Applications – A long, winding road dotted with Bystanders
Frank Scavo’s Computer Economics has a nice post about the the long, winding road – the slow customer march to cloud applications. Bill Kutik pointed to similar slow movement more specific to HCM cloud applications in a recent LinkedIn post. My recent book and my advisory work provide an additional perspective to their data. I identified a large […]
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 […]
Plex ML project – something every software vendor/systems integrator could emulate
By Vinnie Mirchandani on August 26, 2019
Plex ML project – something every software vendor/systems integrator could emulate Machine Learning is a hot topic. Every software vendor is talking about ML and AI in their products. Plex applied ML to something very different – an understanding of how their customers configure parameters in the Plex system. This conversation with Jerry Foster, CTO, […]
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