Preface Nearly all clients are seeking greater prosperity in 2024. While client organizations are still focused on cost reductions to meet the challenges of their new economic and market realities, the pent-up demands of the business are increasingly calling for innovation, automation, and organizational performance improvement. We foresee a volatile and unpredictable business landscape predicated on geopolitical tensions, economic uncertainty, and continued supply chain disruptions as client organizations continue to diversify their technology supply chains, but digital transformation continues to be an investment area. Digital ...
Read More
Oracle in hunt for new money With Oracle Cerner integration going slowly, and as expected most valuable and highly skilled resources are leaving the organisation, the Cerner acquisition has not delivered (yet) the value Oracle has been expecting so far. See our post from 2021 on this topic here. So, what can you do and what do you need to know? Increase the annual YoY price increase on core products to a minimum of 8%. In an economic tide, where clients are creaming for cost optimizations Oracle, has increased their starting position for support renewals to an 8% YoY increase. Only when a client would be committing to new business of the ...
Read More
A significant change to Oracle's Java licensing policy was announced January 23rd 2023. The Java licensing changes are clearly designed to increase revenue for the company rather than provide for a greater or enhanced product. While most well-run businesses seek to increase revenue, with Oracle we must view with a critical eye however, as these types of initiatives typically don’t do much for the customer in the way of added value. In addition to the revenue bump these changes will impact for Oracle, they are clearly also designed to eliminate competition (also not in the customer’s favor). It is important to note that these changes do not ...
Read More
Like many of the market leading SaaS companies, Veeva’s fiscal year-end is January 31st. Why is this important? Most technology suppliers before their fiscal year end will have an extreme ‘push’ by sales management to extract every last dollar of potential revenue before they have to report out their annual earnings. As any sales representative will tell you, everyone wants to close strong at the end of the year. Veeva is no different. To that end, however, there can be opportunities for savvy buyers who are willing to research and invest time in understanding their supplier and their place in the market - even with only days to go. It’s ...
Read More
Coupa’s rise in the SaaS Business Spend Management sector has been impressive since its founding in 2006. Since its stock traded at an all-time high in 2021 at over $350/share, it’s been a rocky road for the company. In a market with greater competition and an economy putting inflationary pressure on companies, Coupa has found both its market cap and stock price plummeting since that high water mark. Since the very start of 2022, Coupa has been targeted as a potential acquisition, and as of this week – that’s what happened with Private Equity firm Thoma Bravo has agreed to an $8B takeover. With Thoma Bravo, trying to acquire, they may be in ...
Read More
SAP customers are facing some difficult and well documented hardships of late, especially those still on the Slow Road to HANA. For many, the migrations have become far more than was originally bargained for. As we have stated in previous articles, SAP’s greatest Cloud success has been in its acquisitions like Ariba, Concur and SuccessFactors. On their own, SAP has struggled. While SAP touts it’s 100% growth in S4/HANA Cloud growth and backlog, for customers, the story is far different as underutilization and adoption woes rule the day for a huge number of them. Given customers are facing these challenges, SAP continues marching forward with ...
Read More
SAP Market Alert: Proceed with caution. With SAP Cloud Revenue exceeding expectations and SAP Management cheering on the RISE program, it looks like they finally have been able to get some traction with a business change program. Some SAP customers that have been delaying their ERP refresh, maybe thinking they are running out of time to make a final decision on what to do with their SAP R/3. Not coincidentally, the RISE program seems to come at the right time for some, as an easy option when they are already on an SAP Platform. We caution our Clients however, in taking a shortcut in your deliberations and not disregard the natural ...
Read More
CRM and Marketing Disruption: Rapid Changing client behavior (initiated by COVID-19) and less physical interaction, required additional means to connect to prospects and grow your business. If you are not doing it your competition will, and companies are loading up on technology to help them achieve this. The problem is, that many companies are loading up and buying the wrong products, at the wrong price, for reasons that are not shared across the enterprise. General Situation: Most Organizations have a CRM (Salesforce, Oracle, SugarCRM, Hubspot etc.) and one of the many Marketing automation tools, but lack the customer knowledge in order to ...
Read More
Veeva Systems by their own declaration is experiencing spectacular growth. In their latest earning call for Q3 2021 (from December 2020), they confirmed total revenue was up 34% year over year! The global pandemic certainly contributed to this growth by their own admission, but they have taken steps to ensure this streak continues. In our experience and analysis with Veeva, we see three main points to consider when starting or renewing agreements, because understanding their place in the market and the way they sell are just as important as their functionality. Below we outline these three areas and offer approaches to help ensure you get ...
Read More
