Michael Welsh

May. 4,2016

Salesforce.com recently announced a major change in its Sales Cloud subscription programs that requires customers to act before Salesforce Q2 starts (which was May 1st) to lock in with old pricing model or automatically move to their new plan, and there are some potentially major implications for our clients. It’s imperative that you know how these changes impact your budget in the near future, and more importantly – what you can do about it. The most interesting part of this announcement and change seems to be the creative use of the word ‘Lightening’, which appears to be not much more than a significant increase in price, coupled with some ...

Michael Welsh

Mar. 31,2016

“The relative weakness in the legacy on-premise (Oracle) software business, which includes sales of new licenses and support revenue, is expected to continue.” - Forbes, December 15, 2015 The money tree is shaking. There was a time when audits were merely punitive in nature, a tool to be wielded to bring a customer who may or may not be in compliance with hundreds of terms, conditions, and clauses they’ve signed up for over the course of years in some cases to heel. But that was then, and this is now. Audits are now the norm – routine – as traditional on premise software providers like Oracle attempt to bridge the revenue gap as they attempt ...

Scott Braden

Feb. 1,2016

Microsoft’s Enterprise customers should already realize that “Team Redmond” is in a desperate rear-guard battle to defend its incumbent monopoly positions in infrastructure software, against the increasingly successful insurgent attacks from Amazon, Google, and an ever-growing list of startups and disruptors. The ‘softies’, with great fanfare, are using every trick in their huge, complex, ever changing book of tyrannical licensing rules, to push their customers away from traditional licenses for on premise software, towards cloud subscriptions. Why would one of the richest companies of all time intentionally cannibalize its incredibly ...

Steven Zolman

Jan. 22,2016

About 3 years ago, Ms. Virginia (Ginni) Rometty took over as the new CEO for IBM, and it has been anything but smooth sailing for her, the Company, IBM's customers, the technology market, and perhaps most importantly, the IBM shareholders. Since March 14, 2013 IBM has suffered through 11 consecutive quarters of poor performance. At the start of that time, IBM’s stock price was $215.80 per share. IBM stock has now fallen to $122.59 per share as of 22 January, a 43% reduction in value. Back in 2012, when Ginni Rometty first took over, I was one of the first (if not the only) to predict that Ginni Rometty would fail as the new CEO of IBM, and ...

Steven Zolman

Jan. 14,2016

Salesforce.com is massively expensive at scale. In fact, our compre hensive study of over 20 leading customer relationship management (CRM) software providers again reveals that Salesforce.com has the highest total cost of ownership (TCO) in the market, meaning that Salesforce.com is quite simply the most expensive way you can furnish your organization with CRM software. A super majority of clients are economically sub-optimized in their Salesforce.com investments. At NET(net), we have seen very serious problems with the commercial arrangements (among other areas). In fact, due to our extensive work in this area, we have developed the ...

Steven Zolman

Jan. 12,2016

The State of the Enterprise CRM Market Salesforce.com continues to be the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software market leader with around a 20% share by the end of 2015. SAP, Oracle, and Microsoft have all stabilized over the last several years, but SAP and Oracle are showing signs of a steady decline at the expense of the other CRM providers. Of the “Big Four” CRM suppliers, Salesforce.com remains the clear front runner in 2016, and due to the relatively unimpressive results from the other challengers, we believe Salesforce.com will remain at the top this year as well. To make matters worse for SAP and Oracle, the industry trend ...

Steven Zolman

Oct. 26,2015

Top 10 Reasons Why the Dell EMC Merger is DOA The $67 billion Dell purchase of EMC is the largest technology deal in history -- dwarfing other major deals, but unfortunately, we think it’s too late for these two former tech titans. The writing is on the wall as they say – or in modern terms, the writing is in the cloud. After analyzing the possible scenarios of what this deal means to our clients, we can find nothing that addresses the fundamental and underlying problem both these firms face, in what is an almost certain long term decline brought on in large part from the insurgency of cloud companies. NET(net) believes this Dell EMC Merger ...

Steven Zolman

Oct. 23,2015

There is a confluence of events happening right now that makes Q4 2015 one of the best times in recent history to (re)negotiate SAP deals, as the following market conditions are creating an environment that is placing significant downward pricing pressure on the German based enterprise software giant. Opportunistic market conditions: 1 - The Laggard Market Players Believe it or not, there are still first time SAP buyers, and this is a great time to enter the market. New ERP purchasers are among the most coveted buyers in the market right now. Relatively new cloud ERP offerings as well as strong competition between traditional software ...

Steven Zolman

Oct. 8,2015

There is a perfect storm of sorts brewing for Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) resulting from (i) increasing demands for new license revenue, (ii) aggressive competition from disruptive suppliers, and (iii) a significant migration away from software licensing to subscription cloud-based solutions. As a result, ISVs are scouring the market for revenue injections wherever they can find them. The mission today for the big market software players is less about innovation and ‘delighting the customer’, and more about protecting the revenue streams of their business, and nothing is more important to them than the golden goose egg of annual ...

Scott Braden

Aug. 11,2015

Gorillas. They can be cute and seem cuddly from a distance, but up close they are probably more scary and intimidating. There’s little doubt that Microsoft is the 800 pound gorilla in the desktop productivity market. The real question is, how do you get away from the gorilla when you’re trapped in its domain? Everywhere you turn…there it is, blocking your escape. Door number 1 is blocked by the CIO who’s not a ‘change agent’. Door number 2 is blocked by the groups who don’t ‘want their cheese moved’. Doors number 3 and 4 aren’t even blocked…they are wide open and they have a Google or Amazon logo on them. But you’re not so sure about running ...