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 […]
Bookings vs. Billings in a SaaS Company
Financial analysts speak a lot about “billings” in a public SaaS companies, but in private VC-backed SaaS companies, you rarely hear discussion of this metric. In this post, we’ll use a model of a private SaaS company (where we know all the internal metrics), to show how financial analysts use rules of thumb to estimate […]
The Leaky Bucket, Net New ARR, and the SaaS Growth Efficiency Index
My ears always perk up when I hear someone say net new ARR — because I’m trying to figure out which, of typically two, ways they are using the term: To mean ARR from net new customers, in which case, I don’t know why they need the word “net” in there. I call this new business […]
NetSuite under Oracle: a progress report
I have seen way too many large vendors under-leverage their acquisitions. They mostly benefit from the incremental revenues but lose talent and value of the acquired IP. The week prior, I was impressed by how Rob Enslin has started to coalesce SAP’s cloud acquisitions like Ariba and SuccessFactors, and how that group of business unit […]
Workday: The relentless pursuit of excellence
I am a big fan of Tom Peters’ classic. He has a new book out on excellence and I will get to that but this week at the Workday analyst summit I found I was reading a live case study on excellence. Between taking notes and photos of slides, I kept going back to my posts […]
My Appearance on DisrupTV Episode 100
Last week I sat down with interviewers Doug Henschen, Vala Afshar, and a bit of Ray Wang (live from a 777 taxiing en route to Tokyo) to participate in Episode 100 of DisrupTV along with fellow guests DataStax CEO Billy Bosworth and big data / science recruiter Virginia Backaitis. We covered a full gamut of topics, […]
Anaplan: The verticalization of analytics
I spent a few hours at Anaplan’s annual Hub conference in Vegas. It is my first time at an Anaplan event and I sensed the buzz of a vendor going through a phase of rapid growth and having to manage expectations when you are tagged as a ‘unicorn” based on your valuation. The executives seemed irked […]
My SaaStr 2018 Presentation: Ten Non-Obvious Things About Scaling SaaS
Below please find the slides from the presentation I gave today at SaaStr 2018, about which I wrote a teaser blog last week. I hope you enjoy it as much as I enjoyed making it. I hope to see everyone next year at SaaStr — I think it’s the preeminent software, SaaS, and startups conference. (Cross-posted […]
Microsoft Business Applications Analyst Forum – a scorecard
By Vinnie Mirchandani on February 16, 2018
Readers know my favorite vendor event format is the analyst summit. I have written extensively about Workday, Salesforce, Oracle, Plex and other summits on this blog and at New Florence. Interestingly, while other vendors have been perfecting the art of the analyst summit (see here, here and here) Microsoft which used to run a very informative and enjoyable annual […]
Posted in Business, Featured Posts | Tagged Cloud Computing, Enterprise Software (IBM, Industry Commentary, microsoft, oracle, SaaS, sap