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).