#TheDailyBestofEnterpriseSoftware – September 13

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

#TheDailyBestofEnterpriseSoftware – July 22

SAP Co-CEO Snabe to Step Down – Jim Hagemann Snabe announced plans to step down as co-CEO of SAP citing plans to enter a new phase of his career where he can stay closer to his family. This will put the SAP CEO role solely in the hands of Bill McDermott. It is an amazing transition for SAP to have someone like McDermott as the sole CEO of this Germany-based corporation. McDermott is an American, former sales executive. SAP’s top leadership history has been European-based executives, generally with strong product or development roots (although the multi-national, multi-linguistic former SAP CEO, Leo Apotheker, also came from more of a sales background). However, McDermott has earned this top position. Since joining SAP in 2002 as SAP America’s CEO, McDermott has had tremendous success virtually every year. He can be credited for transforming the sales culture of SAP America into a more value-driven, competitive organization. As for Snabe, he will stay on as co-CEO for 10 more months and then join SAP’s 16-member supervisory board chaired by SAP cofounder, former chairman and CEO Hasso Plattner.

Battle for the Cloud: Amazon vs IBM – As we know, Amazon sells everything from books to technology cloud services. Amazon offers highly competitive rates and makes it easy for companies of all sizes to leverage the cloud for many of their IT solutions. But if you want super secure data to be hosted in the cloud, you probably would think twice about Amazon and leverage the resources of a company like IBM. Right? Not so fast. Amazon Web Services (AWS) recently won a $600M contract with the Central Intelligence Agency. AWS also has some other notable customers including NASA, Pfizer, and Samsung. This really starts to give Amazon serious credibility when it comes to hosting information securely in the cloud. In the meantime, IBM isn’t idly sitting around watching Amazon eat their big piece of pie. IBM acquired SoftLayer Technologies in June to make them more competitive in the public cloud space.

NetSuite and Qlik Technologies Lead the Way in 52-Week Stock Performance – Over the past year, NetSuite and Qlik Technologies are leading enterprise software stocks with NetSuite up nearly 90% and Qlik up 73% (see the 52-week stock comparison chart) NetSuite is the cloud-based ERP system co-founded by Larry Ellison of Oracle. Qlik Technologies is a $380M software company that delivers user-focused business intelligence solutions. As opposed to some of the high profile, new-era enterprise software companies such as Salesforce.com, Workday, and NetSuite, Qlik Technologies has also posted positive net earnings for the past three years.

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