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 ...
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These days the whole world sometimes feels like a Snowflake… and by that we mean that growth is slowing, and stocks are generally down as reality sets in. Snowflake, the company, is still growing but nowhere near the breakneck speed of the good (?) old days. Macroeconomic factors may be contributing to that, but we believe that, like our clients, the market for Snowflake has figured out that deployments need to be actively managed so that the negotiated costs are not exceeded. Early Snowflake customers learned the hard way that their first agreement would ultimately set the floor for what they would spend, eventually understanding that their ...
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We know. Making a difference can be tough in IT given the multiple layers of bureaucracy, sacred cows, and politics that is ever present in almost every organization. And of course, there are often sound and practical reasons why change is not a good idea, but what is almost always a good idea, is to at least investigate and plan for change. Only in this way are you actually ready (mentally and physically) to propose and follow through with it. So, as you read through the below items, some may sound familiar and or best practices while others could be a fresh initiative to take on that may get you on the path of significantly lowering your ...
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How You Can Win Against an 800-Pound Gorilla Salesforce became the market leader in 2013 and has dominated the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) jungle ever since. With its fiscal year-end in January, now is the best time to review and optimize your Salesforce spend. In the early 2000s, Siebel was the market-leading (and most expensive) CRM (and remained so long after it was acquired by Oracle in 2006 for $5.8 billion), until it lost so much market share that the once unassailable technology goliath finally met its inglorious end. Technically, Siebel is still part of Oracle’s lifetime support policy, but for all practical purposes, it's ...
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The Rise of the Consumption-Based Pricing Model One thing is clear in 2022: The technology industry is moving away from per user per month subscription models and moving towards consumption-based pricing models, and it’s no wonder why. With the ability to capture value from all customer consumption, the revenue-capture and resulting earnings of firms like Snowflake have significantly outpaced even the most successful subscription-based companies, and this is pushing enterprise valuations into a completely new stratosphere, providing ample incentive for technology suppliers to migrate towards consumption-based pricing models. Executives like ...
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Introduction Workday was ranked #1 in NET(net)'s Top 10 HCM HRMS Suppliers for 2021 blog. The cloud-based system mostly known as a Human Capital Management (HCM) platform for global workforces is delivered as a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and offers the following modules: Human resource management Business process management Reporting and analytics Benefits administration Compensation management Talent management Survey framework Employee and management self-service Program and Project Management Payroll and Workforce Management Professional Services Automation Enterprise Planning Higher Ed Student Support Spend Management Many ...
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In 2021, Veeva was named as our #1 Technology Supplier to Watch, and with good reason. In our view, Veeva had the ability to outflank Salesforce.com to make a vertical cloud for the global life-sciences industry; something that Salesforce and others failed to do. Marquee customers include AstraZeneca, Bayer, Bristol-Myers Squibb, GlaxoSmithKline, Merk, Nestle, and Sanofi. With this vertical industry focus, Veeva has enjoyed considerable success, and with its premium-priced platform, its success has come at the expense of its customers. Now, with over 50% market share in the life sciences customer relationship management (CRM) market, Veeva ...
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The adage goes: "The more things change, the more they stay the same." Although technology moves at a rapid pace, the predatory behavior of software vendors does not really change. Certainly, it works for them as the numbers show: Microsoft net income: $44.2B Oracle net income: $14.1B IBM profit: $5.6B Not coincidentally, these are the top 3 suppliers most likely to audit you according to a recent ITAM study of 465 IT Executives conducted by Flexera. This fact comes as no surprise to us, as we wrote about this in 2019 in an article titled: The Top 10 Audit Crazy Suppliers, where our top 3 mirrored the IT Executive survey exactly. In fact, 9 ...
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Prior to establishing Microsoft, Gates and Allen had already formed another company while they were both still students at a high school in Seattle. They designed a computer system that automatically processed traffic counting data called Traf-O-Data. The aim of this was to read the raw data that was produced by roadway traffic counters and transform these into reports for traffic engineers. Apparently, they had a limited amount of success with the company, but it helped them to develop the computer programming skills that was instrumental in founding Microsoft. It also gave them the opportunity to develop their business skills, turning ...
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Like a party no one wanted to go to, the COVID pandemic dragged many IT Executives into (over) spending on technology that was not planned for. In the frenetic pace to ‘keep the lights on’, expenditures were made without the scrutiny they may have normally received pre-COVID. Supporting all the work from anywhere (WFA) initiatives including conferencing, PCs, and remote access software and hardware were all added to the mission critical initiatives already underway, like digital transformation and cloud migrations siphoning money away from those other priorities. As you start planning for your 2022 budgets, you may just now be realizing and ...
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