Seeking salvation in the cloud

In a time of flat markets, companies struggle to find their next growth drivers. Software companies are hoping cloud computing will be their salvation

Oracle CEO Mark Hurd’s keynote at the company’s Open World conference in San Francisco yesterday illustrated a problem facing businesses around the world and its effects on enterprise software vendors like the one he heads.

“Standard and Poor’s top five hundred companies’ revenue growth is at one percent, their earnings growth is five percent.” “It means what? Expenses are going down.”

“This is the problem that the CEO has,” he says. “Why is it hard to grow revenue. All your investors want you to grow earnings and deliver growth. They have little patience for any long story about why it’s so hard.”

“They don’t care about any issues you may have. Grow earnings, grow cash flow, grow stock price. That’s it.”

Growing in a slow market

As a result of that the easiest way to grow earnings is to grow revenues but when global GDP and markets are flat, the only way to grow is to gain market share, Hurd says. “We have to know the customer better, we have to do a better job of marketing and we have to do a better job of aligning our goods and services to what our customers want. We have to improve our products and processes.”

That imperative for companies to cut their operating costs has had a brutal effect on enterprise IT budgets, “over the past five years, the growth in enterprise IT has been flat.” Hurd says, “the growth in spending has been basically zero.”

Customers drive the market

Like many things in the tech industry, the sector’s growth focus has shifted to consumers, “consumer spending on IT has almost quadrupled in the past decade. So while companies are sort of flat, consumers have been spending like crazy.” Hurd observes, “consumers are more sophisticated, more capable, more knowledgeable and expect better services than ever before.”

“Your customer experience is not being defined by your competitors but by technology fuelled consumers. For instance, AirBnB may be defining customer experience for the hospitality industry.”

“People are using a lot of social technologies in their personal lives,” “we expect ease of use, simplicity, clean interfaces are now things we expect in the enterprise side.”

Crimping innovation

In the enterprise IT sector, Hurd believes the flat market means many companies catering to the corporate market are skimping on Research and Development which in turn is crimping innovation, a factor compounded by cloud providers taking an increasingly larger share of the market.

This is underscored by cloud leader Amazon Web Services spending over ten billion dollars a year on R&D. Hurd’s boast that Oracle is spending half of that shows how the legacy players are struggling.

What stands out in Hurd’s keynote is how legacy providers see cloud computing as their salvation. However Amazon’s dominance in that space is a major obstacle for them.

For consumers, big and small, the shift to the cloud has been a good thing in shaking up the existing industry and making new technologies more accessible to smaller customers. For existing businesses like Oracle, there’s a challenge in adapting to a lower margin, commoditized and quickly changing market.

A bigger question though facing all large corporations, not just software companies, is this new normal of low economic growth. Succeeding in that environment is going require a completely different management and investor mind set to that of the last seventy years.

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Profits on the cloud

Can old school software companies make big profits from the cloud? Oracle’s CEO claims they can.

One of the things that cloud computing has changed for the software industry are the fat profits – the shift to Software as a Service (SaaS) has seen the margins collapse as the rental model doesn’t offer the same big lumps of cash that the old way of doing business offered.

That has had terrible consequences for a generation of enterprise IT salespeople who lived well on fat commissions as they sold million dollar packages to large corporations and government agencies.

So it was interesting today to hear Oracle’s CEO, Mark Hurd – a master IT salesman himself – claim at the company’s Open World press conference today that operating margins on cloud services are quite good.

Certainly Oracle’s results show that with a claimed 61% profit margin there is money to be made in cloud services however their experience is not typical of the industry. For example, Microsoft’s online products only deliver a third of the profits as the company’s more traditional software lines.

Even with the still fat profit margins, it’s hard to see how a company like Oracle can maintain its old salesman driven model as deals based more on long term service contracts rather than big deals mean there aren’t the lumps of cash for salespeople to grab a slice of.

Older companies struggle with shifting mindsets in their industries and some, such as the taxi business in the face of Uber, take too long to change. Whether software companies like Oracle are navigating the change is something I’ll look at in tomorrow’s post.

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Microsoft quietly buries its smartphone ambitions

Microsoft quietly exits from the smartphone industry hopefully to focus on cloud computing and artificial intelligence.

Last week Microsoft quietly buried its smartphone ambitions with the announcement they would shed 1,850 jobs largely from the remains of the Nokia business they acquired four years ago.

Microsoft’s Lumia exercise was expensive for the company but even more costly in terms of missed opportunities.

Those opportunities are now in cloud computing and artificial intelligence services. Shareholders will be hoping the current CEO Satya Nadell executes a lot better on them than his predecessor did with smartphones.

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Retreat from the cloud

Despite the benefits, there’s a number of risks of having your data or applications hosted on cloud services.

Despite the benefits, there’s a number of risks of having your data or applications hosted on cloud services. The three most important are costs, availability and portability.

Having spent the last three days at EMC World in Las Vegas, the cost factor in public cloud services is clear for larger enterprises and many companies – including the soon to be merged EMC and Dell – are basing their business plans on corporations and government agencies bringing at least some of their IT function back in-house.

Smaller companies too are at risk from high costs as a myriad of cloud services can quickly become a big drain on a small business’ finances.

Availability has long been a problem with cloud services as they are at the mercy of internet access and, more importantly, subject to the whims of companies’ policies. Two good examples being Amazon’s arbitrary deleting of users’ kindle licenses and Google’s Real Names debacle.

In the last two days another version of this has arisen where a musician found Apple Music had deleted his collections, while there are claims this ‘bug’ this may be due to clumsy user interfaces it shows the risks in entrusting key data to the cloud.

Which leads us to the most critical point with cloud services – portability. Many online businesses are working on the basis of locking customers into their services.

Most founders asset they want to lock customers in by offering the best services but it’s not hard to see as these companies grow, the urge to use proprietary formats or convoluted exporting tools to keep clients on the platform becomes stronger.

Cloud services aren’t going away but all of us are going to have to take precautions and understand the risk. And backup locally as often as possible.

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Getting academics onto the cloud

Discount and free software programs are good for educational programs but they do risk industry wide vendor lock in.

Offering free products to students and academics has long been a tactic used by software companies to build their market presence. The current fight for dominance in the cloud is seeing the same tactics being used.

Last week I had the opportunity to talk to Amazon Web Services’ Glenn Gore about his company’s academic support program.

Part of that conversation ended up in a story for The Australian about how researchers are now using cloud computing services and it’s worthwhile looking at how AWS are using this program to cement their products’ market positions.

“We work with the majority of universities across Australia,” Gore said. “It’s part of an international focus around how we support the education sector in general.”

In some respects AWS’s behaviour isn’t new, for years Microsoft, Autodesk and Adobe have had programs offering free or deeply discounted products for academic or student use. The success of those schemes in becoming defacto industry standards is no small reason why these companies have dominated many sectors.

Microsoft themselves have the similar Bizspark program for tech startups and it’s easy to see how that initiative is helping push Azure’s adoption into a field that has been dominated by AWS.

One of the drawbacks though with cloud computing services is the risk of ‘sticker shock’ where customers end up with big bills. One of the universities I spoke to in researching the story recounted how 0ne of their faculties was presented with a huge AWS invoice because their engineers didn’t provision the services correctly.

This is where AWS’s team steps in with advice for researchers, “in the case of Koala Genome Project use the on-demand model, the standing pricing model for the cloud,” recounts Gore in pointing out the nature of their work could use spot-pricing to take advantage of cheaper prices in off-peak times. “As a result of making that one change they were able to do eighty percent more research.”

Getting more research time is always attractive for researchers and Dr Rebecca Johnson who leads the Australian Museum’s part of the koala consortium was particularly effusive about the support from AWS staff,

“What we have been able to access via this partnership with AWS is compute time and compute capacity that we just would not have had access too,” Dr Johnson said in a media release. “It would have cost us thousands and thousands of dollars to create and we just would not build such a computer system these days. You would not create your own computer infrastructure as we would only use a fraction of it anyway. So, it is great for us to piggy back off these already built systems.”

Being a relatively small institution, the Australian Museum is a good example of how cloud computing can work for those without the resources of big universities or corporations in the same way small businesses and startups can access resources formerly only available to enterprises.

Amazon’s programs though show the Microsoft model of getting students and startups onto their systems early pays dividends. It’s good for academic institutions but one wonders whether it’s also another form of vendor lock in.

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It’s hard to make a buck on the cloud

Microsoft’s results impress the market but there’s a way to go yet.

Microsoft released its quarterly financial results to general acclaim from the stock market which drove the shares seven percent higher after reporting slightly better than expected returns.

The market was applauding the continued shift to cloud services with income rising five percent in the company’s Intelligent Cloud division, however the decline in the company’s more traditional strengths of software licenses and devices saw earnings fall by eleven percent over the corresponding period last year.

More concerning for the company’s shareholders would be the profits that have fallen 23% which once again proves that cloud services are much less profitable than Microsoft’s traditional software business.

To make matters worse margins on cloud services are falling with returns from the division declining despite sales being up five percent. It’s not hard to see the effects of Amazon Web Services’ ruthless driving down of cloud service prices.

While Microsoft’s results are encouraging in that they show the company is continuing its evolution to a cloud services business, it’s clear the legacy products are still the key cash generators.

As of December 31, Microsoft has a 102 billion dollars in the bank so there’s little risk the company will be going broke soon however the company has to find a way to make better profits from its new business models.

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Creating a digital spaghetti divide

A business digital divide could be fatal for those caught on the wrong side of it.

Are we seeing a new digital divide develop between big and small businesses, particularly in areas like retail and hospitality?

This thought occurred to me during a radio spot earlier today where we were talking about Apple Pay’s Australian launch. Many small businesses don’t have the capital or expertise to implement many of these new technologies.

A number of factors contribute to this including the legacy systems installed in small businesses, the proprietors having a poor understanding of technology and, most importantly, the lack of either capital for reinvestment or cashflow to fund the monthly charges that are standard for cloud computing services.

The expensive cloud

One unstated factor with cloud computing services is how the cost of services add up. For example a Premium 10 Xero customer with Receiptbank attached is looking at a $100 a month in charges. It’s not hard to see how adding cloud based Point of Sale, rostering and customer service software could see a small business incurring $400 a month in fees, throw in Salesforce and you could be looking at a very expensive exercise.

No doubt for those companies that can afford these services this is money well spent but for many margin or low turnover businesses, the charges could be a deal breaker.

Spaghetti Junction

Another aspect to the cloud services is the myriad of different platforms that need to be stitched together in most businesses, one cloud service founder calls it “digital spaghetti.”

Managing this bowl of complexity isn’t easy and raises a number of business risks as different services apply varying policies and practices to the data they collect and store. A breach or service failure at one could cause a ripple effect through all business operations.

For many small business owners, particularly older proprietors, managing this complexity is intimidating if not downright scary.

It may well be there’s a number of opportunities for a canny service provider to offer an out of the box small business solution, but for many older small operators with limited capital and restricted cashflow affording such a product might also be difficult.

The risk though for those businesses is they will find themselves falling further behind as markets, consumer demands and the workforce’s expectations evolve. A business digital divide could be fatal for those caught on the wrong side of it.

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