Hyperaggresiveness … Can You Do It?
Recently I’ve met with several of my friends who are moving on, or have moved on, to their next SaaS company after some real success in their first one. SaaS 3.0 entrepreneurs, I guess. They all have some measure of initial success in their next venture. To me, given their backgrounds, and their ability to [...]
You Really Don’t Know if Your Market is Too Small For Quite a While
One of the things that causes a lot of anxiety in SaaS is market size. If you’re creating the latest Pinning app, or Social Network, the odds are surely against you. But in consumer internet, often you know if you hit it, however low the odds are, at least the market is huge (or at [...]
Conference Report: Workday Rising
Last week I attended the analyst event organized along with Workday Rising 2012 conference. Workday Rising is Workday’s (previous CloudAve coverage)(Disclosure: Workday is the sponsor of CloudAve and this is my own personal opinion but they paid for my travel and stay) user conference and it was their attempt to interact closely with their customers [...]
SAP and SuccessFactors – Proven Integration is Hype
Early last month I wrote The Real Truth about SAP and SuccessFactors Integration to try to clear up some of the confusion in the marketplace. To my surprise I had several SAP customers reach out telling me they were very surprised at my article as it contradicted the message they were getting directly from SAP. These customers [...]
Workday Launches Version 18 – Quick Analysis
At the Workday Rising event being held in Las Vegas this week, Workday announced the latest version of its product, on top of which they held an analyst/influcner day that I was following remotely. I’ve got a few thoughts about the analyst day but first a recap of the news.
Workday is Growing 90% this Year. At $250m in ARR. So Wake Up: You Probably Need to Do A Lot, Lot Better.
The thing is, what you really have to ask yourself, if you are growing less than 100-150% YoY — all the way to $100m in ARR — is the market just too small? Or if not — am I just not well enough positioned in the market?
A Pictorial Tale of Two Conferences (and more)
Recently I’ve attended two conferences two weeks apart in San Francisco, and the difference in style is shocking. One did not even feel like a conference, rather a Festival – Woodstock, Mardi Gras, SXSW – your pick:-) The other a decidedly more “closed” traditional corporate conference, so much so, that fellow commentators actually compared it [...]
The Workday IPO and ‘F You Money
The other day, a VC asked me about a founder he was thinking of investing in. He asked me if this founder had, quote, ‘F You Money. {I learned how this was spelled when a Businessweek article this week used the term, btw}. I wasn’t really sure if he meant this as a negative, but [...]
Looking Forward to DreamForce 2012
The annual Salesforce extravaganza DreamForce is just around the corner (disclosure, I’ll be attending DreamForce and Salesforce will be covering my T&E account) and with it comes my annual look forward and prediction of what is to come. For reference check out my previous prediction posts here and here. This
FinancialForce 2012 Release–Delivering a Loosely Coupled Set of Solutions
Nicely timed to coincide with next week’s DreamForce conference comes the summer 2012 release from FinancialForce, the cloud accounting company that is both part owned by Salesforce, and built upon the force.com platform. While product announcements tend to be a little ho-hum, this one is interesting since it comes from
Why Cloud ERP? Cutesy Video
The cutesy video above was created by SAP, the first part talking about the benefits of Cloud ERP, the integrated approach in general, and while the last minute turns into a SAP Business ByDesign pitch, it could very well be viewed as overall industry promotion, applicable to archrival NetSuite, and to some extent Workday, and [...]
Why Workday Is Different by Design, and Why It Matters
We use the object model to define both the structure of our applications (classes, relationships, and attributes) as well as the logic of our applications (methods). All parts of the object model are defined as metadata. Instead of the thousands of relational tables and millions of lines of code used to define traditional enterprise software, Workday applications consist of millions of metadata definitions
SAP Assembles Cloud Powerhouse with Ariba, SuccesFactors Acquisitions
Emphasis on “assemble”, as opposed to develop. For years SAP and Oracle fought a religious war of acquire/assemble vs develop in-house. SAP’s view was (even under the current Co-CEOs) that you can only get to a coherent, seamlessly integrated suite by development. Apparently they have changed religion, borrowing a chapter or two from Larry Ellison’s [...]
Zuora Partners With a Host of Mid Market Financial Vendors
In my extensive writing around the subscription billing space, I have often noted that it is a very polarized sector of our industry with a handful of well funded companies providing services for large organizations – Zuora, Vindicia and Aria fit in this space. These companies are maneuvering for position
The Future of (SAP) HCM Consulting and SuccessFactors – 2012
SAP recently released their first public product roadmap on their acquisition of SuccessFactors and I provided my initial thoughts in an article titled SAP and SuccessFactors Roadmap Analysis. A lot of people have reached out to me worried about the future and trying to understand what this means to the overall SAP consulting market. In an attempt [...]
