Blue Ocean

  • February 14, 2013

    • Old pal, Chris Kanaracus (who covers enterprise software and general technology breaking news for The IDG News Service) has a story in InfoWorld yesterday which is very interesting in that it describes the current dynamics of the enterprise software business.

    Just to convolute things, the article is about a recent report from Forrester Research, which describes the lackluster adoption of Oracle Fusion Applications.  I get the impression that Forrester is telling a cautionary tale and getting ready to, um, “put out the fire and call in the dogs” where Fusion is concerned.  But, really, what were they or anyone else expecting?  Take a look at the opening paragraphs:

    “Oracle spent years developing its next-generation Fusion Applications and finally put them into general availability nearly a year-and-a-half ago, but some new evidence suggests that it’s been less than successful at enticing customers to move up.

    Two-thirds of 139 Oracle applications customers surveyed by Forrester Research said they had no plans to implement Fusion Applications, while another 24 percent said they didn’t know whether they would, according to a new report out this week.

    The article goes to great lengths to document how customers are more or less standing pat on their existing systems and waiting for someone else to make the next move.

    Well, what did we expect?

    The thesis of the report (which I have not seen) seems to be that customers are not flocking to the new, new thing and that therefore Oracle messed up — must be marketing’s fault (Louie, round up the usual suspects.).  Much the same critique could be levied on SAP but I am not going there right now because most of what I have to say applies there too.

    Rather than being some aberration, this is exactly what you’d expect in a mature market.  Think of it from the customer’s side.  The old saw that companies spend money for only two reasons — to make more of it or to save it — applies here.  Existing customers have the older model of the non-Fusion Oracle applications and they are installed, running and paid for.

    So?

    In the recession that we’re still dealing with there are many ways to save money, notably by not hiring or laying off workers, that don’t involve spending new bucks to replace what’s already working.  There are also precious few ways to make new money and the record corporate earnings gushed over in the financial press stem largely from penny-pinching — layoffs, reduced head count and not investing in the future, which is exactly what Oracle is facing in its customer base.  But this is typical mature market behavior even in the best of times.  In order to get someone to buy the new thing, your new offering has to be much, much better than what’s already in the barn or nothing happens.  So, no matter what Oracle does to promote Fusion, it’s facing an uphill climb.

    We don’t have to dwell on the mature market though and the Forrester Report unintentionally shines a bright light on why it’s so important to innovate not just within a product cycle but way beyond it.  Our pathological obsession with quarterly results makes it very hard to get out of the box and go beyond the product cycle but that’s what the idea of Blue Ocean Strategy is all about.  Dell is a great proof point for this given its recent effort to go private.

    Another great example, if you’re not tired of hearing about it, is Salesforce.com.  They’re not in the replacement business except for replacing Oracle and SAP legacy systems with their cloud offerings.  More to the point, Salesforce has an elongating history of Blue Ocean thinking, of not simply trying to replace old functionality with new stuff that does the same thing but a bit cheaper.

    Salesforce still has issues with market adoption of its newer offerings.  But notably, customers are trying to figure out how to best apply them, which is very different from whether or not the new items can pay for themselves with cost savings.  When companies discuss Salesforce’s Blue Ocean products they’re having very different discussions about what the future holds and how they will encounter it.

    So while I don’t think the Oracle Fusion news is very remarkable, I do think it’s time for them and just about every other enterprise software company to do the same — to think about the future and build a bold vision.  Their last bold visions are now aging products, today’s legacy systems.  Time to saddle up.

    Published: 11 years ago


    So, just about a month after Dreamforce, Salesforce.com is coming to New York for one of its regional Cloudforce conferences.  The event will be at the Javitz Center in Manhattan on October 19.  Salesforce is expecting six thousand attendees.

    The focus of the event is supposed to be on the newly re-announced Marketing Cloud — the amalgamation, so far, of Buddy Media and Radian6.  I will be briefed under NDA about the news to be announced at the event but that hasn’t happened yet so, hey, let’s speculate.

    As many of my colleagues have suggested, the Marketing Cloud is a good and important down payment on a full-featured marketing component but it is heavily weighted toward social marketing.  They expect more acquisitions primarily to beef up the Marketing Cloud’s lack of a conventional marketing campaigns element — the kind that runs traditional marketing programs.  I am not so sure.

    Salesforce already has a bevy of more or less conventional marketing partners in the AppExchange like Eloqua, Marketo and others.  It’s true that these vendors are not monogamous but so what?  They have good connectors and integration and are doing everything they can to carpet bomb, er, I mean cover, the Salesforce installed base so why buy what’s free?

    My instincts (which are right about half the time — and less when I’m driving according to my wife) tell me that Salesforce is going in another direction.  The company has always exhibited a Blue Ocean Strategy approach to its business seeking out niches that haven’t been named and I expect it to do the same in marketing.

    That means they’ll concentrate on the myriad ways to market in the social world.  If they make an acquisition — and I bet there’s nothing on the radar right now — it will be to beef up social marketing not conventional stuff.  That would mean companies like HubSpot or Awareness or Nearstream or others (some in the CRM Idol contest) that use a healthy dose of new age thinking and social media to access and communicate with customers.

    So, what to look for in New York?  In addition to October baseball, I think you’ll see elaboration of the basic message doled out at Dreamforce.  The San Francisco session was packed with information and image-making and there really wasn’t time to unpack all of what the Marketing Cloud means for customers.  I think Cloudforce is the place where the unpacking will happen.

    Salesforce has been great at three-pronged marketing for a long time.  That’s where they tell you what they’re going to tell you, then they tell you and finally the circle back to tell you what they told you.  I think they’re at part two and Cloudforce New York will be more of a deep dive.

    I could be very wrong but that’s what it means to speculate.  Right?

    Published: 12 years ago


    I am not a financial analyst and I don’t even play one on TV.  Of course, judging by the last five years’ performance of those in the financial sector I’d say there is a serious dearth of such talent.  Of course, that doesn’t stop the sector from issuing reports and guidance about individual companies.  Heck, it’s their job.

    I ran across a report today from Cowen Research about Salesforce that leaves me with lots of questions.  The report downgrades the stock based on potential future performance, which is fine as far as I am concerned.  No company and no company’s stock stays at the top all the time, that’s a given.  But I don’t understand the logic of the analysis.

    The reasons for the downgrade are several but all stem from what the report sees as “…billings growth slowing faster than expectations.  In 3Q, CRM (Salesforce’s ticker symbol) missed billings expectations.  Mgmt repositioned other bookings related metrics as better metrics, yet is unwilling to provide regular details around these other metrics.”

    I was at Cloudforce New York earlier this month when a financial analyst pointed this out during a press conference in a question for Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.  If you are an industry analyst as opposed to the financial variety, what ensued was about 20 minutes of the most boring back and forth between the analyst and Benioff.  It reminded me of the Monty Python skit about the dead parrot. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6Lq771TVm4

    I am not sure anything material was accomplished other than for Benioff to reiterate his company’s guidance that it would have a run rate north of $3 billion in its next fiscal year.  I am working on memory here but I believe the issue was that the company issues revenue numbers as its primary guidance.  They could, but don’t, focus on gross sales because they are a SaaS company.  If for example, a customer signs a $20 million deal over five years that works out to a million dollars per quarter and that’s what they report on because that’s what’s current revenue.

    So, no matter what the size of the deals Salesforce is signing, they only recognize a fraction of them each month or quarter.  This is effectively leaving money in the bank and the analysts have a problem with that.  This is a part of educating the financial markets about the subscription economy.  Subscriptions are so different from conventional product sales, and their revenues, that some analysts effectively try to put a square peg into a round hole when they are assessing a company.

    Salesforce also recently announced that it will offer enterprise licenses to enable whole enterprises to take advantage of its sprawling product lines and the analysts have problems with that too.  Here in three parts is, in my opinion the most serious and erroneous part of, their analysis.  Let me take them sequentially.

    1) Competition is catching up.  Oracle is defending the enterprise, Microsoft is gaining traction in the mid market, and SugarCRM is gaining ground at the low end.

    This is true.  Everyone has a flavor of cloud computing today.  After more than a decade of having their brains bashed in by Benioff touting the benefits of SaaS and cloud, other vendors have put browser front ends on their products and shipped operations elsewhere (a.k.a. but not really, “The Cloud”).

    But we all know that this minimal move does not accomplish the intent and that real cloud computing is also more sustainable because it makes far better use of storage and compute facilities, sharing gear where it makes sense.  Moving a data center to another location with dedicated servers and spindles is like moving your dirty coal fired powered power plant to another state and calling yourself an environmentalist.

    Other vendors are catching up in CRM but most of them also have ERP customer bases that they are spending considerable effort defending as the industry enters a new replacement round.  Several competitors have also announced social media products and their versions of cloud computing.  Alas, announcement is not delivery but it does raise an important question:  if the market is so crowded why are so many vendors rushing into it?

    2) Massive investments in Sales have over stimulated the market beyond its natural growth rate. Next year normalized sales productivity will decline, making growth even harder absent extremely aggressive investments in sales and marketing at the expense of margin.

    I am not sure what the natural growth rate for CRM is but I believe you can say the same for ERP, except in the once in a decade period when everyone wants to buy the new technology.  The market for enterprise software’s existing solutions is fairly saturated.  Heck, if you’ve looked at the GDP nationally or globally lately, you understand that growth is not exactly on the march anywhere.  That’s why innovation is key.

    3) The company has lost focus. Management’s obsession with the new new thing has distracted it from crisp execution in its core market, SFA. The push behind Collaboration, PaaS and Social Media Monitoring have taken sales into different and unproven categories with different buyers.

    A natural characteristic of markets is that growth slows over time as demand is satisfied.  That is why companies come out with new products and services.  It’s also why market lifecycles graph out as sigmoid curves instead of straight lines.  Given this truth, number 3 above is puzzling.

    Salesforce has done an admirable job of refreshing and extending its product line into uncovered areas of the front office.  The company could have easily built an ERP system and jumped into an already crowded market for back office technology.  But it chose instead to build net new products in markets that are quickly evolving and where there is little organized competition.  This is sometimes referred to as a “blue ocean strategy” after a book by the same name.  The essence of the idea is that a successful company finds unoccupied niches and satisfies the needs of those niches.

    By my analysis, in the software world that means identifying new approaches to business that will help organizations reduce the friction found in all business processes.  Business today is being buffeted by credit and other financial challenges as well as soaring resource costs lead by oil but also including many raw materials especially the so-called rare earth elements that are needed to make modern technology.  You don’t need to be a chemist to understand that rare earth easily translates into expensive.

    So in all that should a company like Salesforce elect to penetrate ERP or decide to penetrate new markets in a blue ocean strategy?  Time’s up.

    The financial analysts see it differently.  According to them Salesforce has lost its lead on the competition and then lost focus by going after new niches.  “Management’s obsession with the new new thing has distracted it from crisp execution in its core market, SFA. The push behind Collaboration, PaaS and Social Media Monitoring have taken sales into different and unproven categories with different buyers.

    If you take this at face value, the only thing for a company to do is the stand still and let the competition devour it.  Many companies have taken just this advice and obligingly gone to hell in a handcart.

    How can you first say, that massive investments in Sales have over stimulated the market beyond its natural growth rate and follow it up with management’s obsession with the new new thing has distracted it from crisp execution in its core market, SFA?

    Finally, there’s this weird nonsequitur: “…we remind investors that the company’s platform was built over a decade ago and is likely in need of a rewrite at some point to take advantage of the latest technologies.”

    Well, not exactly.  The application set was begun more than a decade ago and through its life Benioff has stated that they’ve rewritten the platform.  Salesforce has been rebuilding the platform to expose it to the outside world incorporating other languages (Java, all of Heroku, etc.) and ways of delivering content including websites and to add functionality, especially in the social media realm.  Who else is trying to do this?

    Salesforce is far from a perfect company and it’s right for analysts to be watchful of any company so that they can advise clients on investment decisions.  But I’ve been watching this company for a long time and I don’t understand how some of it’s core strengths can be seen as weaknesses.

    Published: 12 years ago