by twieberneit | Jul 29, 2022 | Analysis, Blog |
After spending two days in Austin, TX, attending the ZohoDay 2022, it is time for a little recap of this interesting event. We were 99 analysts and 24 customers and plenty of knowledgeable Zoho personnel. The incredible Sandra Lo and her team organized the event around open and transparent communication. So, there was plenty of access for us to customers and the Zoho team. Which was very important, as already the keynote session by founder and CEO Sridhar Vembu was quite hardcore. Vembu talked about how strategy and culture need to be one, how culture needs to be the root of strategy, and how Zoho implements this. The Zoho strategy lies on three main pillars Transnational localism, a unique concept that in its essence is about embedding a company into a local community by not only selling into it but also by investing into it. This investment is e.g., by offering high paying jobs in areas where these are scarce, by fostering local education, but also by own local sourcing including local materials and using sustainable practices when building. That way, these communities become self-reliant. Zoho first introduced this concept in 2020. In essence, Zoho sets up shop outside of centers, in rural areas, in a hub and spoke model. Tightly integrated products that together form a powerful platform to run a complete business. This is counterintuitive to the thought of apps using a common platform to deliver their services.Privacy as a core part of all applications and services, born out of the idea that the need for free flow of data needs to be governed by privacy. This is a great...
by twieberneit | Jul 25, 2022 | Analysis, Blog |
The News On July 21, 2022, SAP reported its numbers for the second quarter 2022 and the first half of the business year 2022. In contrast to the last times, I’d like to cover this in written form, as this one is quite interesting and probably takes a bit longer than 5 to 10 minutes. SAP changed the report structure to reflect the common cloud service terminology. It is reporting IaaS, PaaS and SaaS now. The overall cloud revenues increased by 34 percent, with some tailwind by the current weakness of the Euro. The cloud backlog surpassed € 10 bn for the first time, growing at the same pace. S/4HANA Cloud revenue is up by 84 percent, with the backlog even growing at 100 percent. This revenue growth is consistent across the reporting regions. For the first time, SAP broke out PaaS revenues, which came in at € 389 million, up 49 percent yea over year. Not surprisingly, the profitability went down, which is attributable to loss of business due to the war in Ukraine and unfavorable conditions for SAP Ventures. The bigger Picture The enterprise cloud market is extremely contested. It is a saturated market that is dominated by few vendors that are able to support important parts of or even the complete business value chain. The challenge facing all these vendors is the necessity to scale down into the mid and lower mid-market. This, however, is a region that is covered by smaller vendors with similar aspirations, e.g., Creatio, Freshworks, Hubspot, Odoo, Pega, ServiceNow, SugarCRM, Zendesk or Zoho, to name but a few. The big vendors in this Clash...
by twieberneit | May 11, 2022 | Analysis, Blog |
The News On May 10, 2022, Zoho released Zoho Marketing Plus, its suite of marketing solutions. You can read the complete press release here. The suite combines multiple Zoho applications including Campaigns, Social, Webinar, Analytics, Marketing Automation, Workdrive, PageSense, Survey, and Backstage. It shall provide digital marketers with a unified platform of integrated capabilities that help them achieve their objectives more easily through a combination of simplification, integration and embedded collaboration capabilities. Zoho Marketing Plus brings together marketing activities throughout the whole campaign life cycle from ideation through creation, execution to measurement. This allows to manage campaigns and provides the whole marketing organization with a single shared view of information. “Consumers and digital marketing continue to evolve at warp-speed, and marketers are struggling to keep up. It’s becoming increasingly difficult to properly manage multiple campaigns, channels, customer profiles, data, and ROI,” said Mani Vembu, Chief Operating Officer at Zoho. “The complexity of data and personalization at-scale only raises pressure on marketers and CMOs to deliver effective campaigns and revenue. By eliminating redundancies and confusion arising from multiple siloed solutions, Zoho Marketing Plus maximizes productivity and teamwork, allowing marketers to stay nimble and collaborative amid evolving customer needs. When marketers aren’t bogged down by operations, they can deliver creative campaigns that promote meaningful relationships between the brand and customers.“ With Zoho Marketing Plus, Zoho addresses mid-market companies with around 250 to 1,000 employees and a structured marketing organization with a progressively thinking leadership. Early customers show themselves impressed with the breadth of the functionality as well as the support for the end-to-end support that is offered by the platform. Says...
by twieberneit | Mar 3, 2022 | Analysis, Blog |
The News On March 3, 2022 Zoho released the new version of its Creator no-code/low-code platform. It offers a unified development platform to empower both IT teams and business users. The new release is targeted at building end-to-end solutions in an easy way. It combines integration, process automation and analytics/business intelligence with the ability to build applications and offers application management capabilities needed to manage security, compliance and governance. Along with the built-in collaboration features it allows for a tight collaboration between business- and IT users. The bigger picture About a year ago I wrote a first article on no-code and low-code platforms, based upon the realization that the ongoing digitalization and necessity for business agility in fast changing environments require more than traditional developer support. At that time I cautioned that business users should not just be allowed to do everything without governance in order to avoid another “Lotus Notes moment”. Since then the world moved on. No-code and low-code have become an indispensable part of the business applications world. They are critical to the fast adaptation of business applications and process automation across business applications. This is a task that is traditionally handled by IT departments. These, however, are regularly understaffed to be able to fulfil all the operations and enhancements demands that are on their desks. To achieve this, no code and low code platforms need to support both, IT departments as well as the business departments. This means that they need to straddle a considerable gap. Typically, no-code and low-code platforms concentrated on either business users or IT departments. The latter are not really useful for IT departments as they...
by twieberneit | Jan 21, 2022 | Analysis, Blog |
The News On January 20, 2022 Medallia announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Thunderhead, the leader in customer journey orchestration, or like the press release states it, leader in every-channel journey orchestration. The transaction is expected to close in the first quarter of this fiscal year. The stated benefit for customers is that “with the combination of customer experience insights and journey orchestration, organizations can have a single view of the customer journey and use real-time interactions to improve experiences and loyalty.” Thunderhead is expected to “strengthen Medallia’s ability to power individualized journeys and conversations at scale, across all online and offline channels, helping Medallias’s thousands of customers continue to increase their brand loyalty, sales and growth.” Thunderhead founder and CEO Glen Manchester says that “the acquisition heralds the next era of customer experience. We pioneered the idea of the customer operating system, with our closed-loop customer engagement platform powered by continuous listening, feedback and learning, all actioned through our unique fusion of journey orchestration and real-time interaction management (RTIM). With Thunderhead, Medallia can ensure that every single aspect of the customer lifecycle – marketing, commerce, sales and service – will be a seamless, relevant, and frictionless experience.” Tl;dr Watch my snap analysis – or read on. The bigger Picture The name of the game is CX (platform). As with any platform game, it is crucial to have enough scale. On top of this, the markets for CDP, segmentation, personalization, real-time interaction management and customer journey orchestration are converging. A CDP provides the persistent and transactional data foundation that allows the delivery of the additional value that insight...
by twieberneit | Jan 19, 2022 | Analysis, Blog |
The News On January 18, 2022, Microsoft announced the intention to acquire Activision Blizzard with the vision of bringing the joy and community of gaming to everyone, for $95 per share, which equals a transaction value of $68.7 bn. This is a bit more than eight times of the revenue that Activision Blizzards expect to have in the fiscal year 2022. With this acquisition, Microsoft can add 400 million monthly active users to the already existing 25 million Game Pass holders. Until the acquisition closes, the companies will run independently. After completion of the transaction, Activision Blizzard wil report to Phil Spencer, the newly appointed CEO of Microsoft Gaming. This acquisition makes Microsoft the third largest gaming company by revenue, after Tencent and Sony. The stock markets reacted with a sharp increase of Activision Blizzard shares to about $87, while Microsoft stock largely followed its pre-existing slight downward trajectory. Here my analysis in a brief video. The bigger Picture We have currently around 3 billion people and growing, who are actively gaming. Millennials and younger do not even know a world without social media and smart phones. They often play using mobile devices. Microsoft, on the other hand, is available on basically every device and offers quite some hardware, too, either directly or via partners. Additionally, Microsoft already before was a known entity in the gaming market, e.g. owning gaming platforms like Minecraft and Doom. Still, according to Shacknews, Microsoft seems to have missed the own growth targets, even though an increase of Game Pass holders from 18 million to 25 million in the year 2021 is quite significant. Apart from the...
