Month: March 2017

Enterprise SoftwareInfrastructureSaaS

Why I love and fear AWS

Posted on by Ed Sim

The AWS launch of Amazon Connect (see techcrunch article) got me thinking about the current state of play in SaaS. Amazon Connect is a call center in a box, the same tech it uses in-house for their current platform. With that release, companies like Talkdesk and others have much to fear. While I see partnerships with companies like zendesk, salesforce and freshdesk to integrate voice with chat and email, I also firmly believe that it is just a matter of time before AWS continues to extend outward and deploy their own chat/email customer support system to go after their partners. Trust me, it will happen.

I fully acknowledge and love AWS for the opportunity to fund so many amazing founders who are fully leveraging the power of the cloud platform and services. What I also greatly fear is that Amazon and AWS have proven that they are amazing at taking markets that become hyper competitive and just blowing them up overnight with the lowest cost and good enough offering. AWS has also proven that it will continue to move upstream in the stack from the pure infrastructure layer to the application layer.

Here are a few examples:

  1. Amazon Quicksight (launched 10/15) –  fast, easy to use business analytics at 1/10 the cost of traditional BI Solutions
  2. Amazon Chime (launched 2/17) – frustration-free online meetings with exceptional audio and video quality – companies like gotomeeting (Citrix) made a smart move selling to LogMeIn
  3. Amazon Workdocs (1/15) – fully managed, secure enterprise storage and sharing service, users can comment on files, share, etc – box, dropbox watch out

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Enterprise Software

Thoughts from Mulesoft and AppDynamics IPO Filings

Posted on by Ed Sim

I finally had a chance to take a quick read of the respective S1 filings for AppDynamics and Mulesoft. While the growth for each company is quite amazing, two thoughts jumped out at me.

As we move to a cloud-only world with instant-on capabilities and low friction in onboarding customers, why does professional services revenue keep increasing year over year for these enterprise cloud businesses. Secondly, as the world continues to move to the cloud, why does on-prem software exist any more?

Looking at both S1 filings, it’s clear that AppDynamics and Mulesoft have caught on to what Salesforce already knows – if you want to be a massive business you also need to sell professional services. As these tech companies get larger and larger, their target customer also increases in size as these vendors look to move from 6 to 7 figure deals. In order to support continued ARR growth upstream, some of the best companies successfully use professional services as a weapon and make implementation, support and training part of the sale. See Jeff Leventhal’s post (boldstart venture partner and Workrails cofounder/CEO) on why services continue to matter for cloud vendors.

Same goes for why on-prem. In both S1s, we can see Mulesoft and AppDynamics discussing the need for multiple delivery models as many larger customers have regulatory and compliance needs, esp. in banking, insurance, and health care. On-premise and hybrid cloud deployments are not going away despite the continued adoption of the cloud. There is a whole world of what being enterprise ready from a product perspective looks like, and how SaaS companies can use new technology like Docker to have the best of both worlds, SaaS and on-prem without multiple code bases. If interested, take a look at EnterpriseReady.io curated by Replicated (full disclosure: boldstart is an investor).

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Enterprise Software

Building AI on CXOTalk cutting through AI hype, "applied AI" to enterprise

Posted on by Ed Sim

I had a great time participating on CXOTalk by Michael Krigsman with boldstart portfolio co founders, Sean Chou from Catalytic and Keith Brisson from Init.ai

When you get down to it, AI is going to be huge in the enterprise but you need to make sure to focus on solving real business problems. Watch to learn more on our discussion about “applied AI.”


Here are some nuggets of wisdom:

Companies are removing #data silos. This will enhance usage of applied #AI

— @keithbrisson @edsim  on #CxOTalk

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Enterprise SoftwareInfrastructure

Apps sell infrastructure

Posted on by Ed Sim

Pivotal just announced it did over $270mm of revenue in 2016 from Cloud Foundry helping large companies with digital transformation. That’s some nice growth from the $115mm the year earlier.

The initial Pivotal Cloud Foundry sales pitch was that it gave big companies a way to build new applications that run in a public cloud (rented space on Amazon (AMZN, +0.47%) Web Services, Google (GOOG, +0.34%) Cloud Platform or Microsoft (MSFT, +0.62%) Azure) or private cloud (flexible infrastructure that runs in a company’s own data center.

The need for faster, better software deployment resonated with older companies facing competition from smaller, newer rivals that already use cloud computing. You could argue, for example, that Hilton (HLT, +0.05%) and Hyatt (H, -0.47%) hotels should worry more about Airbnb (AIRBNB) than about each other.

This is yet another sign how large companies are embracing cloud technologies and microservices to be more agile. At the end of the day, it’s not about buying Cloud Foundry because of infrastructure savings, its the ability to quickly and scalably deploy new applications quicker to meet business needs. That’s the bet Pivotal made many years ago, and it’s paying off.

Remember if you are selling infrastructure – stop, sell apps to the heads of business who have a huge sense of urgency to get things done. Most of them also have pretty sizable budgets as well. The byproduct of all of this is saving money but that is not what moves the needle.

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