Hot Trend: Easy-to-Use Analytics Software – In an Investor’s Business Daily interview with Christian Chabot, CEO of Tableau Software, Chabot refers to the analytics offerings from Oracle, SAP, IBM, and Microsoft as “complicated, development-intensive, staff-intensive, inflexible, slow-moving and expensive. And every one of those adjectives is true for each of the market-share leaders in our industry.” And while it may be easy for a CEO to take pot shots at his primary competition, there is no hiding the fact that customers and investors seem to like what Tableau has to offer. Tableau’s revenue has been up 80% in each of the past three years and shares of Tableau stock are up 44% since it IPO’d in May of this year. Qlik Technologies, another analytics vendor that offers quick deployments and “self-service BI”, has also been a winner with customers and investors. Qlik Technologies revenue increased over 70% from 2010 to 2012 and its stock is up 20% year-to-date.
Certainly, many companies will opt for the larger, more robust platforms offered by SAP, IBM, and Oracle; however there are a growing number of companies that favor “easy” and “quick deployment” solutions over functional completeness and integration. Perhaps, SAP sees this as an attractive feature of KXEN, the predictive analytics solution that it is planning to acquire. With corporate cost cutting and lean IT shops, it’s easy to understand the appeal and growth of solutions that go in quick and are easy to use.
Enterprise Software Stocks – Week in Review
Overall, it was a good week for enterprise software stocks as they were in positive territory and generally outgained the NASDAQ. IBM and Tableau are this weeks leaders with each gaining approximately 4.5%. Teradata and SAP followed with gains in the 2 to 3% range. This weeks laggard is Workday which was nearly flat for the week; perhaps taking a pause from some impressive gains during the course of this year.
That’s the Best for today. Please chime in if you feel I missed something or you like/dislike my takes (I’m ok either way).
Bern Baumgartner
ERP Ready, Inc.
http://www.erpreadyinc.com
@erpreadyinc
ERP Ready Blog 