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"SaaS/subscription businesses are much more complex than traditional businesses, and SaaS performance cannot be measured in the same way as traditional businesses are measured. Based on a talk given at the SaaStr Annual Conference in San Francisco, this slide deck offers a comprehensive and detailed look at the key metrics that are needed to understand and optimize a SaaS business, and how these can be used to drive SaaS success. This presentation includes information on: An intro to SaaS metrics Unit economics LTV and churn: An in-depth look Variable pricing axes Months to recover CAC The primary unit of growth: Sales Understanding public SaaS companies"

"But Microsoft is way ahead of Oracle when it comes to the IaaS segment with Microsoft Azure growing at triple-digit speeds for the last several quarters. Oracle's IaaS segment grew only 6% during the latest quarter, a growth rate that exemplifies its weak position in the strongly growing IaaS market. As Office 365 keeps marching onward and upward, Microsoft is gaining an even stronger foothold in the enterprise segment. Its IaaS offering is as good as any other company out there in the segment, something that is also validated by the strong growth numbers it has been reporting in the last two years. As Microsoft keeps expanding its business management software portfolio that includes CRM and ERP, the company will be in a unique position with strong cloud offerings in SaaS-PaaS-IaaS segments that will be unmatchable by its competition. Companies will naturally gravitate toward a single vendor that can take care of several workflows instead of going through the headache of handling multiple vendors and worrying about integrating all of them to work seamlessly. With Microsoft, that won't be a problem, and that's something Nadella is consciously crafting out of the company's many disparate products. But don't get me wrong. The need for multiple SaaS vendors will always be there. Different businesses have different needs, and there will be times when only a niche player would be able to adequately address those needs. But when you have a company that can take care of the majority of the workflows as well as workloads, like Microsoft can, you'd rather keep Microsoft to handle all the heavy lifting while throwing in a few more SaaS companies to address the entirety of your technology needs. There won't be a need to have Salesforce (NYSE:CRM) manage your customer relationships, Oracle handle your enterprise resource planning, Microsoft handle your office productivity suite and Amazon handle your infrastructure. All you need is a few clicks on your Microsoft

"I'm thrilled to announce the public launch of Usermind, my first investment at Menlo Ventures, and one that I'm particularly excited about. Within the first 10 minutes of meeting Michel Feaster, founder and CEO of Usermind, I knew I had to invest. Michel is an impressive entrepreneur - smart, high-energy, passionate, thoughtful, and a big product thinker - and she just happens to be addressing an incredibly important problem in the enterprise that is getting more pronounced by the day."

Aug 4, 2016 at 18:30 GMT Everyone knows that Amazon is the current leader in the cloud infrastructure market by a huge margin. But it is not just about cloud infrastructure (IaaS), enterprises need SaaS, PaaS, and several others for a complete solution. Microsoft today highlighted that they are the only vendor recognized as a leader across Gartner's Magic Quadrants for IaaS, PaaS and SaaS solutions for enterprise cloud workloads. Microsoft is in a unique position with their extensive portfolio of cloud offerings designed for the needs of enterprises, including Software as a Service (SaaS) offerings like Office 365, CRM Online and Power BI and Azure Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS). And Microsoft's cloud vision is a unified story that we're executing on with the same datacenter regions, compliance commitments, operational model, billing, support and more. The ability to deploy and use applications close to data with consistent identity and a shared ecosystem, means greater efficiency, less complexity, and cost savings. Take a look at the table on the top, Microsoft is a Leader in almost 18 different cloud solution categories while Amazon is a leader in only three of them and Google in none."

"Vas Natarajan, partner at Accel: "I wonder if we'll look back at 2016 as the year Microsoft laid the tracks for a huge victory in the cloud wars. There's a major flank happening here in bits and pieces - and many of those pieces began to fit together this year: Office 365 becoming the de facto cloud productivity package for enterprise workers; The acquisition of LinkedIn as a foundational data asset for a pending assault in sales and marketing SaaS; Azure becoming a credible, cost effective IaaS/developer platform with meaningful enterprise sales/support/solutions; MSFT's accelerating support of open platforms & open source; Continued investment in the oft-dismissed .NET developer crowd with their Xamarin purchase; and Fervent, organizational-wide support of Satya and his vision for serving a mobile, cloud, data-enabled world. This doesn't even consider the massive incumbency advantages MSFT already has given their years of selling to the enterprise." "

"Although Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS) still maintains its lead in the public cloud space, Microsoft's Azure platform may be turning the tide in larger enterprises. A new survey lends credence to that perception. The survey comes vio Sumo Logic, examining "The New Normal: Cloud, DevOps, and SaaS Analytics Tools Reign in The Modern App Era." Sumo Logic, which describes itself as a "machine data analytics service," contracted UBM to survey 235 IT operations, application development, and information security professionals at companies with at least 500 employees, with about half of the respondents working at companies with 5,000 or more employees. At that high end of the enterprise spectrum, the survey found, Azure actually beats AWS. "In the early days of the cloud, Amazon Web Services (AWS) took the lead as the cloud computing vendor of choice," the survey report said. "But the survey revealed that as the cloud matures, organizations are becoming more comfortable with vendors other than AWS and are using multiple cloud vendors. In fact, while other reports show that AWS still has a lead in cloud market share, the top cloud vendor in this survey -- which included only organizations with at least 500 employees -- was Microsoft Azure. [Click on image for larger view.] IaaS and PaaS Vendors (source: Sumo Logic) "When asked which IaaS or PaaS vendors they were using (with multiple responses allowed), 66 percent of respondents cited Azure. Interestingly, more than half of the Azure users were from organizations with more than 10,000 employees, which suggests that Microsoft's cloud is particularly popular with large enterprises. AWS came in second with 55 percent of respondents, followed by Salesforce App Cloud (28 percent), IBM Cloud (23 percent), and Google Cloud (20 percent).""

"Considering Salesforce is sitting on top of $1.9 billion in cash, the amount they spent on venture capital is still pretty small. The $145 million cash they invested last quarter is only a fraction of the $731 million it generated in operating cash flow, too. But the fact that Salesforce is increasingly looking for ways to find the next future growth engine through these investments sends a positive sign to the market, Stifel's Rodericks says, especially as Salesforce becomes a more mature company. "They're sitting on a ton of money on their balance sheet, so to a certain degree, investors would like to see them make these strategic investments in companies around this space," Roderick said. And that could potentially lead to more acquisitions, he noted, as Salesforce Ventures has been more active on the buy side too lately. It acquired sales intelligence software RelateIQ for $390 million last year, after spending $2.5 billion on marketing software ExactTarget two years ago. "This certainly gives them more visibility in the companies that they might look at as partners or potential acquisitions down the road," he said. We should be able to get to find out more about it on Thursday, when Salesforce reports its second quarter earnings. Analyst estimates are pretty much in line with Salesforce's forecasts at $1.6 billion in revenue for an EPS of $0.18."

""The real opportunity is moving mission critical systems in the cloud. [Industries] are the biggest hold out. We see that as the biggest opportunity." That's how Stephan Scholl, co-president of Infor--an enterprise software company that specializes in solutions for specific industries--explains what he sees when he looks at the cloud market. For all of the endless hype about cloud computing over the past five years, most companies have remained slow to move their most important applications to the cloud. Sure, the cloud has been good enough to run a few experiments and save big money on licensing fees with less critical apps like HR and collaboration and some overly-glorified shared address books. That's because if those services go down or get hacked or employees have a slow internet connection then it's no big deal because people can still get their work done. It's different when it comes to the software that your whole company is logged into every minute of the business day. That was the conventional wisdom. But, it's starting to change. PINBOX The Industry Cloud: Why It's Next Read More Large enterprises, SMBs, startups, and everything in between are now taking a hard look at moving their core business applications to the cloud. While that obviously includes software like ERP and financial systems, the even more interesting story is the software that's specific to each industry--insurance, healthcare, manufacturing, real estate, etc. These industries all have specialized needs because they all have very different kinds of business processes. In many of them there are even sub-specialties within industries that have even more specialized needs. "

""Complexity grows over time," says Bryson Koehler, chief information and technology officer (CITO) of The Weather Company in Atlanta. "Systems are built to do one thing, and then they're modified, morphed and bastardized to do things they were never meant to do." Complexity occurs when technologies overlap one another -- "when you add new stuff but keep the old instead of getting rid of it," agrees Dee Burger, North America CEO of Capgemini Consulting. [ Further reading: 5 lessons small IT shops can teach the big guys ] Even as recently as three years ago, Burger says, "people thought they could do massive replacements of technology" -- say, move everything to SaaS applications in the cloud -- "but now we're seeing way more adding of technology rather than replacing." Just consider how many new collaboration tools the enterprise has embraced without replacing or reducing email. The result can be a tangle of overlapping, redundant systems that costs money, slows innovation and hinders organizations from identifying new business opportunities."

"A new player has entered the enterprise productivity race. For decades, Microsoft reigned as the market leader in enterprise productivity - until Google pushed into the space with Google Apps. Now, with the acquisition of Quip, Salesforce is joining Microsoft and Google in the race. The implications, however, extend far beyond productivity and CRM. Recent developments in enterprise software - including Oracle's acquisition of NetSuite, Microsoft's purchase of LinkedIn and Salesforce's acquisition of Demandware and Quip - point to a shift in the market. Enterprise software (not just productivity apps) can no longer be siloed applications bolted together with varying degrees of integration. Today's tools are expected to be cross-functional, with native integration, real-time collaboration and smart communication at their very core. Enterprise software giants across different verticals are moving in the direction of end-to-end solutions in an attempt to own more of the workflow - Salesforce's acquisition of Quip will only intensify the competition. For enterprise software startups, it's indicative of more mergers and acquisitions to come."

"Recently, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said at Forbes CIO Summit that there is a major shift taking place in the global business software space - toward smarter and more predictive software. According to Benioff, analyzing data and suggesting the future course of action are the next wave of business opportunity. With that growth potential in mind, Salesforce has been acquiring a number of machine learning and data analysis startups, including PredictionIO, MinHash, Tempo IO and RelatelQ. Benioff said "This will be the huge shift going forward, which is that everybody wants systems that are smarter. Everybody wants systems that are more predictive, everybody wants everything scored, everybody wants to understand what's the next best offer, next best opportunity, how to make things a little bit more efficient." More smarter, more predictive enterprise software. That's exactly what we're seeing in the marketplace as well - and it's an enormous trend. The demand today for intelligent automation and cognitive analytics is unprecedented. We hear it from system integrators who are moving with us into these solution areas, and we see it from our end customers. Big data has unlocked enormous volumes of information, in-memory databases have made it instantly accessible, and today's cloud environments deliver virtually unlimited computational horsepower.  With all that, what's a business to do? This has now become the key question."

"Amazon has built a multibillion-dollar business in AWS, while Google is far behind. But the cloud is a rapidly evolving beast, and Amazon's advantages are about to be turned against them. THE EVOLUTION OF NEW TECHNOLOGY New technologies go through predictable phases. The hype cycle is phase one. Cloud is well beyond that. Phase two: we build what we already have with the new technology. So, cloud-based file storage. Amazon has moved far beyond storage. They enable customers to build entire data centers in the cloud. That is their key strategic advantage. Phase three is where life gets interesting: we build what we could not build before. More on that in a moment. That's the build side. What about the use side? Today, customers are happy building data centers in the cloud. They are looking for AWS to add more capabilities so they can run their legacy apps and get rid of their internal data centers altogether i.e. cloud admin will be a fast growing occupation; sys admin won't."

"As CIOs look for better value from their enterprise content management (ECM) solutions, they're finding more cost effective ways of operating from cloud based file storage vendors. Box, Google Drive, AWS and others provide the same capabilities offered by expensive ECM solutions. In this article, ECM refers to a solution that stores unstructured data, such as documents, images, and plain text. Traditional ECM solutions are no longer cost competitive and do not provide any additional value over the simple indexing, storage and retrieval capabilities. Shifting ECM management of infrastructure, maintenance and operations to cloud based file storage vendors seems unavoidable to stay cost competitive."

By Mitch DeFelice Recent announcements from Google and Microsoft regarding machine-learning capabilities will provide the ability to transform corporate Enterprise Content Management (ECM) system from a simple unstructured data repository into an oracle of corporate data. In their book Smart Customer Stupid Companies…Why Only Intelligent Companies Will Thrive, and How to Be One of Them - the authors Michael Hinshaw and Bruce Kasanoff articulate how customers are becoming "smarter" with technology advancements.  The book presents a sound case that companies that do not evolve with their customers will become irrelevant. There have been two recent announcements that have occurred (November 9th, 2015 and November 12th, 2015 respectively) that have the potential to turn the metaphorical phase "Stupid Companies" to mean literally that.

"Amazon Web Services reported $3.536 billion in revenues during the fourth quarter of fiscal 2016, which put its annual cloud revenue run rate at above $14 billion. Since Amazon (AMZN) has a negligible presence in the software-as-a-service segment, most of that revenue is coming from the infrastructure-as-a-service segment, which continues to grow at double-digit rates."

"Research firm Gartner's annual report card on the public IaaS cloud computing market shows there is one clear leader - Amazon Web Services - and another clear challenger - Microsoft Azure. And then there is everyone else. "The market is dominated by only a few global providers - most notably Amazon Web Services, but increasingly also Microsoft Azure," Gartner researchers say, giving Google Cloud Platform an honorable mention. "Between them, these three providers comprise the majority of workloads running in public cloud IaaS in 2015.""

The cloud has quickly become a mainstay in IT departments, with recent research from cloud solutions provider RightScale showing 93 percent of businesses using cloud technology in some form or another. But it's not all smooth sailing after the initial migration and integration - many businesses find that the second wave of cloud adoption is just as rough as the first. According to RightScale's 2015 State of the Cloud report, which surveyed 930 IT professionals about their current adoption and future plans involving cloud computing, 88 percent of businesses are using public cloud technology and 63 percent are using private cloud. Eighty-two percent have a hybrid cloud strategy, up from 74 percent in 2014, a clear indication that the cloud has quickly become an essential ingredient of modern IT.

"Technology leaders are disenchanted with the current state of their IT infrastructure. According to a study released Tuesday by global technology provider Insight Enterprises, tech leaders give their companies' current IT infrastructure a "B minus" grade. For its first Insight Enterprises Intelligent Technology index, Insight Enterprises used Market Intel Group to conduct an online survey of a random sample of 403 IT professionals with decision-making responsibilities between Nov. 30, 2015 and Dec. 8, 2015. How to use Windows 10 backup and recovery features Sooner or later, you're going to experience a hard drive failure, usually when you least expect it. READ NOW The study found that 55 percent of respondents felt the current technology in place at their business was a hindrance to incorporating or adopting new technologies, even as 65 percent of respondents were worried about disruption from technology innovation. While 65 percent of tech leaders overall were worried about the prospect of disruption, tech-decision makers at larger companies are especially feeling the pressure: The study found that 74 percent of tech influencers at large companies and 75 percent of tech influencers at medium-sized companies were concerned about disruption. "

"SAFE FINANCING DOCUMENTS The safe (simple agreement for future equity) is intended to replace convertible notes in most cases, and we think it addresses many of the problems with convertible notes while preserving their flexibility. In addition to being simpler and clearer, we intend the safe to remain fair to both investors and founders.During its development the safe was positively reviewed by many of the top startup investors. We believe it's a positive evolution of the convertible note and hope the startup community finds it an easier way to accomplish the same goals. Features of a safe: Unlike a convertible note, a safe is not a debt instrument. Debt instruments have maturity dates, are typically subject to certain regulations, create the threat of insolvency, and can include security interests and sometimes subordination agreements, all of which can have unintended negative consequences for startups. Because the money invested in a startup via a safe is not a loan, it will not accrue interest. This is particularly beneficial for startups, but also better embodies the intention of investors, who never meant to be lenders in the first place. As a flexible, one-document security without numerous terms to negotiate, a safe should save startups and investors money in legal fees and reduce the time spent negotiating the terms of the investment. Startups and investors will usually only have to negotiate one item: the valuation cap. Because a safe has no expiration or maturity date, there should be no time or money spent dealing with extending maturity dates, revising interest rates or the like. A safe still allows for high resolution fundraising. Startups can close with investors as soon as both parties are ready, instead of trying to coordinate a single close with all investors simultaneously. There are four versions of safe, corresponding to the four types of convertible note: Safe Primer Safe: Cap, no Discount Safe: Discount, no Cap Safe: Cap