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Workday Customer Blues: Their Evolution from Market Disruptor to Market Dominator

Where we were: Enter the Disruptor Workday's journey to becoming the market leader in the human capital management (HCM) space is a story of innovation, strategic partnerships, and capitalizing on market shifts. Founded in 2005 by former PeopleSoft executives, Workday entered a market dominated by the old guard, established players like SAP and Oracle. However, Workday differentiated itself by offering a cloud-based solution, a modern user interface, and a focus on user experience, which really resonated with both HR professionals and executives. Workday's growth was further fueled by its strategic partnerships. In 2010, it formed a key ...

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Salesforce in 2024: Innovation Fatigue, Rising Costs, and Your Negotiation Playbook

Salesforce.com has long been a leader in customer relationship management (CRM) Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), but whispers of discontent have been growing amongst its large enterprise customers in recent years. Concerns center around a perceived slowdown in innovation, hefty and seemingly ever-increasing price tags, and a recent wave of key executive departures. This raises a crucial question: is Salesforce still a worthwhile investment for large enterprises in 2024? The Challenges: Certainly, Salesforce offers a comprehensive feature set, strong ecosystem, and enterprise scalability. However, they have a number of challenges, and these are ...

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Top 5 Ways to Save on Datadog

Preface Many client organizations buy a Datadog subscription (at least initially) to monitor cloud application performance to identify and reduce cloud costs (generally as a result of inefficient processing). As time goes on, and the client organization expands its use of monitoring, these costs start to stack up. At some point, clients start wondering, ‘who is the Datadog for my Datadog’!? If you’re getting rolled by your Datadog subscription, you just may need to get that dawg in you. For real! Introduction Datadog is a monitoring and analytics platform for cloud-scale applications, providing monitoring of servers, databases, tools, and ...

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2023 Cloud Cost Series (Part 3 of 3): The Top 5 Reasons Why Clients Are Repatriating Cloud Workloads

Preface Thank you for joining us for this 3-part series on Cloud Costs, where we explore the Top 5 Price Shock Phenomenon’s of Cloud costs, resulting in part from the Top 5 Workloads that are NOT Well Suited for the Cloud, and largely resulting in the Top 5 Reasons Why Clients Are Repatriating previously migrated Workloads from cloud deployments back on-premises: Part 1 (Feb 15): Top 5 Price Shock Phenomenon’s of Cloud Costs Part 2 (Mar 15): Top 5 Workloads that are NOT Well Suited for the Cloud Part 3 (Apr 15): Top 5 Reasons Why Clients Are Repatriating Workloads (This One) Part 3: Top 5 Reasons Why Clients Are Repatriating Workloads In ...

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Oracle 3rd Quarter Results and Your Spend Considerations Before May 31st

Oracle's financials have generally been strong in recent years with their aggressive cloud push, reporting steady growth in revenues and earnings. However, Oracle faces increasing competition from other cloud providers, particularly in the areas of IaaS and PaaS. Additionally, Oracle has been shifting its focus towards cloud-based services and away from its traditional software licensing business, which could impact its financial performance in the long-term. Read our series related to this starting with The Top 5 Price Shock Phenomena of Cloud Costs. In the very short term however, they have missed earnings targets and indicated on their ...

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2023 Cloud Cost Series (Part 2 of 3): The Top 5 Workloads NOT Well Suited for the Cloud

Preface Thank you for joining us for Part 2 of this 3-Part series on Cloud Costs. Please reference the following 3 blogs to get the complete 2023 Cloud Cost Series: Part 1: Feb 15: Top 5 Price Shock Phenomena of Cloud Part 2: Mar 15: Top 5 Workloads that are NOT Well Suited for the Cloud Part 3: Apr 15: Top 5 Reasons Why Clients Are Repatriating Workloads Part 2: Top 5 Workloads NOT Well Suited for The Cloud Introduction Since the mid-2000s, clients have been migrating workloads to the cloud with increasing frequency, but recently, we have seen clients start to repatriate previously migrated workloads back on-premises, due in no small part ...

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Debunking Microsoft Series Part 1: FUD Around Bringing Your Own License to Other Cloud Providers

Scott Braden
Mar. 14,2023 | SaaS Microsoft Cloud

This is part 1 of an ongoing series we call ‘Debunking Microsoft’ where we address the ongoing disinformation, half-truths, and mysticism surrounding its own products as it relates to Customer licensing, usage, contracts, terms, pricing, and much more. In part one, we address what we frequently hear from clients; that Microsoft has told them regarding usage of their own licenses in a cloud other than Microsoft's.....words to the effect of “You can’t use your existing Microsoft licenses on non-Microsoft clouds such as Amazon or Google.” Well, that’s not true and Microsoft knows it. This is just one case of Microsoft’s constant and consistent ...

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Cloud Cost Series (Part 1 of 3): Top 5 Price-Shock Phenomena of Cloud Costs

Thank you for joining us for this 3-part series on 2023 Cloud Costs, where we explore the Top 5 Price Shock Phenomenons of Cloud Costs, resulting in part from the Top 5 Workloads that are NOT Well Suited for the Cloud, and largely emanating from the Top 5 Reasons Why Clients Are Repatriating Cloud Workloads back to on-premises: Part 1: Top 5 Price Shock Phenomena of Cloud Costs Part 2: Top 5 Workloads that are NOT Well Suited for the Cloud Part 3: Top 5 Reasons Why Clients Are Repatriating Workloads Introduction In today’s installment, we’ll discuss the Top 5 Price Shock Phenomena of Cloud Costs. Price Shock is a phenomenon that occurs when ...

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Act Now: Splunk FYE - Pitfalls and Opportunities

Splunk fiscal year end is coming up this January 31st and as a result, many deals are set to renew or are aggressively pursued by the sales teams to close as net new business. Splunk is a clever play of words, it is derived from the word “spelunking which means exploring the information of caves. It was developed by Rob Das and Eric Swan in 2003 as a search engine for the log files that are stored in the infrastructure of a system. The main goal of the founders was to market this developing technology in bulk so that it can be deployed in almost all kinds of use cases possible. Splunk went public on April 19th, 2012, with a $17 strike price ...

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Act Now and Stop Overpaying Salesforce: Market Update

Salesforce has led the market for years. We have pointed to Salesforce as the culprit who broke the early promise of software as a service as (SaaS). SaaS was supposed to be elastic with demand allowing costs to go both up and down. Historically, we know that Salesforce is supportive of increases in their customers' cost but it has been punitive to reductions. With Salesforce’s fiscal year-end coming at the end of January 2023, now is a great time to re-evaluate your deployment and at the very least benchmark to see how your spend compares to the market. But first, more on Salesforce themselves…. Things 'they are a changin' in ...

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