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Which companies are able to develop enough operational flexibility to meet the dictates of customers about what they want, when they want it, how they want it, where they want it, and how they’ll pay for it? Or take the turbulent world of HR, also known rather frostily as ‘human capital management - that awkward term doesn’t quite gibe with ‘people are our most valuable asset’ does it? In the past, businesses were the hunters and job-seekers were the hunted. But today, with employment levels at record highs across many professions and disciplines, those highly talented individuals have become the hunters as they evaluate potential employers based on how compelling and current its website is, what others are saying about the company on social media, and the ways in which the early phases of the recruiting process are conducted.
The Vendor Landscape: The Rush Toward CustomerCentric Connections For the past 30 years, the tech industry did not treat its customers terribly well. While this was generally unintentional, the results were the same: businesses were forced to buy hundreds of thousands of mismatched pieces of software from hundreds of different vendors, and then had to hire armies of integrators and spend millions of dollars to make all that disparate stuff work together. In the cloud, that nightmare is changing. We’re by no means completely there in NirvanaLand just yet,
“CRM has never been more strategic
and you can see that in the growth rates for the CRM marketplace”
MARC BENIOFF CEO Salesforce
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but software vendors fully understand that business customers want more simplicity in how various applications work, how they work together, how they yield data and insights, how they connect to legacy systems, how they leverage AI and machine learning, and how they solve far more problems than they create. As a result, the big SaaS vendors are each scrambling to not just provide that seamless interconnection built around customers and extending both outward and inward, but also to position themselves as the one true SaaS company that can deliver what the others can only dream about. So, if you’re a business executive with a business to digitalise and money to spend, where do you turn? Well, we at ERP Today are happy to help you work through that question—and the following overview of major SaaS vendors and their strategies will arm you with some significant insights.
The SaaS Big 8: Salesforce, Oracle, SAP, Microsoft, Workday, ServiceNow, Infor and Google Cloud. Here’s a look at the high-level capabilities of the world’s largest enterpriseSaaS vendors in the context of meeting the wide-ranging needs of companies eager to become end-to-end digital businesses. SALESFORCE.COM. The world’s largest SaaS vendor, which in 2019 will generate about $16 billion in revenue, has in some ways defied the ‘go wide or go home’ trend by sticking exclusively within the CRM sector that it has dominated for years. At the same time, Salesforce has also expanded aggressively within that increasingly large segment by offering not only every link in the customer-facing chain—marketing, sales, commerce, CPQ, service, support and more—but also by expanding aggressively into verticals with its Health Cloud and Financial Services Cloud, no doubt with more to follow. During Salesforce’s most-recent earnings call, CEO Marc Benioff outlined the market-driven factors that
“Oracle will own 50% of the $400bn SaaS market”
Put another way, Hurd predicts Oracle’s cloud revenue to grow MARK HURD to $200bn. CEO Oracle make him so bullish about his company’s ability to continue growing about 25 percent year on year in spite of its massive size. “I’ve travelled around the world meeting with more than 100 CEOs and world leaders and the conversation is consistent everywhere I go: it’s about digital transformation,” Benioff said on the call. “And CRM has never been more strategic and you can see that in the growth rates for the CRM marketplace—it remains the fastest-growing market segment in enterprise software” because “it’s all about the customer.” ORACLE. Just how bullish is CEO Mark Hurd about Oracle’s prospects in the SaaS business? He recently said he believes the SaaS market will eventually reach $400 billion in revenue—and he ‘volunteered’ Oracle for being the lead dog that will own 50 percent of that, which equates to annual SaaS revenue for Oracle of $200 billion. That’s an absurdly long distance from its current SaaS revenue of about USD4 billion, but Oracle believes that its massive roster of cloud applications—arguably the broadest and deepest in the industry—will carry the day. The core of Oracle’s SaaS business is its cloud ERP applications, with growth rates of between 25% and 40% across its various ERP product lines. Hurd says as customers come to have a good experience with Oracle Cloud ERP, it then becomes much easier to convince them to expand into Oracle HCM and CX (Customer Experience) suites as well.
