Important Subtleties in Calculating Quarterly, Annual, and ATR-based Churn Rates
This post won’t save your life, or your company. But it might save you a few precious hours at 2:00 AM if you’re working on your company’s SaaS metrics and can’t foot your quarterly and annual churn rates while preparing a board or investor deck. The generic issue is a lot of SaaS metrics gurus […]
Oracle Soar: The Last (Application) Upgrade you will ever do
In 1991, I was assigned a team at PwC to build something called “2O to 3O”. Dun and Bradstreet Software, especially its McCormack and Dodge (M&D) unit, was an important practice area for PwC. M&D had released a new General Ledger 3.0, a product with a multi-dimensional code block and a number of other new […]
Workday continues its acquisition trajectory
Many companies make acquisitions to diversify into new markets. Others do it to acquire revenues and customer bases. Workday has been consistent in the last few years to acquire analytical capabilities and talent especially in its back office focus areas – finance and HR. So, its announcement today to acquire Adaptive Insights (and Rallyteam last week) does […]
How SAP is getting its SexyBack
During a break in his concert at SapphireNow, Justin Timberlake took a tray full of shot glasses to every one on stage. It took him a while to hand them out as he said – “we have as many of on stage as there are in the audience”. Those are his Tennessee Kids, a wide range […]
Salesforce is vulnerable
By all accounts, at SapphireNow this week, CRM will be a major focus. And the bullseye will be on Salesforce. Ho hum? Oracle, Microsoft, Adobe, Zoho and many others have been targeting Salesforce for a while. So, join the chase. No, the biggest threat to Salesforce comes from within. Here are three angles Economics Several […]
The Domo S-1: Does the Emperor Have Clothes?
I preferred Silicon Valley [1] back in the day when companies raised modest amounts of capital (e.g., $30M) prior to an IPO that took 4-6 years from inception, where burn rates of $10M/year looked high, and where $100M raise was the IPO, not one or more rounds prior to it. When cap tables had 1x, […]
The Two Engines of SaaS: QCRs and DEVs
I remember one day, years ago, when I was a VP at $10M startup and Larry, the head of sales, came in one day handing out t-shirts that said: “Code, sell, or get out of the way.” Neither I, nor the rest of marketing team, took this particularly well because the shirt obviously devalued the […]
Host Analytics: The Beauty of Focus
Us analysts like to ask vendors: what next? I am constantly asking them to verticalize. Very few vendors actually do that but transaction processing vendors are constantly claiming to add analytical capabilities. Analysts also love to create new market categories. Gartner has two Corporate performance management (CPM) magic quadrants – one strategic, one focused on […]
The next stage of the ServiceNow rocket
I spent a couple of days at Knowledge 18, ServiceNow’s user conference. It was good to get a deeper dive into the product and meet the executives re-shaping the company. Couple of positive areas and couple of potentially problematic areas I picked up. ServiceNow is a “blue-collar” company whose platform first found a niche in […]
The end of Cloud history?
By Vinnie Mirchandani on July 17, 2018
In 1989, Francis Fukuyama, then deputy director of the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff (he has since taught at Johns Hopkins and Stanford among other institutions) predicted the fall of Communism and the world beyond in an article titled “The end of history”. In 1992 he elaborated his thoughts in a book. His view was optimistic – […]
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