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 […]
Public Cloud Soaring To $331B By 2022 According To Gartner
Gartner predicts the worldwide public cloud service market will grow from $182.4B in 2018 to $331.2B in 2022, attaining a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 12.6%. Spending on Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) is predicted to increase from $30.5B in 2018 to $38.9B in 2019, growing 27.5% in a year. Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) spending is predicted to grow […]
Cloud applications – the next phase
It’s heady times for SaaS – cloud application software. Salesforce is entering its third decade with tremendous momentum. It only had $1 billion in annual revenues by end of its first decade and it is expected to have $16 billion by the end of the second. Talk about a rocket ship! Workday, ServiceNow and many […]
A wartime Customer Success SaaS Leader has these five attributes
Dave Kellogg wrote a solid post about the three types of Customer Success Managers. Contrasting them as product-oriented, process-oriented or sales-oriented, it’s a much-needed primer at a time where the vocation of Customer Success is still nascent. Dave’s post got me thinking that there is also a need to contrast happy time vs war time CS leaders. During […]
Is Another SaaSacre In The Offing?
I’m not a financial analyst and I don’t make stock recommendations [1], but as a participant and observer in the software investing ecosystem, I do keep an eye on macro market parameters and I read a fair bit of financial analyst research. Once in an while, I comment on what I’m seeing. In February 2016, […]
Combining functions in a SaaS business is a terrible idea
Ok, here is the punch line: No two SaaS functions should be coupled together. Any combination forces conflicts of interest and while you and the board are busy charting out your world domination strategy, this dysfunctional org design will eat the company from the inside out. The long form: Combining Product and Engineering Why it’s a […]
The third decade at Salesforce
Congrats to Marc Benioff and team for twenty glorious years. $1 billion in annual revenues by end of first decade, $ 16 billion forecast bt the end of the second – what a rocket ship! He is also one heck of a generous, big hug kind of leader. I have enjoyed cataloging him and the […]
