Category Archives: Companies

TripAdvisor

How is mobile impacting how people book travel?

What are trends in the competitive landscape?

  • OTA: Priceline, Expedia
  • Metasearch: Trivago, Kayak, C Trip, Hotels Combined
  • Large Online Search (basically meta-search): Google, Bing, Yahoo, Baidu, Facebook, Alibaba, Amazon
  • Restaurants: Yelp, OpenTable (Priceline)
  • Vacation Rentals (Airbnb, Homeaway (Expedia))

What are competitors saying about TRIP in their transcripts?

Consider strength of UGC communities

  • Yelp (restaurants); Trip (travel); Zocdoc (doctors); Amazon (items)

Key metrics to analyze

  • Supply side: number of hotels, number of vacation rentals, number of restaurants, number of activities
  • Engagement indicators: number of reviews, candid traveler photos, places to stay, contributions per minute

What are the dynamics of hotel usage vs. alternative accomodations (Airbnb)

  • Easy booking with no human intermediaries

What is sustainability and dynamics associated with Priceline and Expedia partnerships?

What is TripAdvisor’s core demographic? (this relates to the potential success of their TV campaign)

What are risks associated with CPC based advertising?

How have online travel companies fared during economic downturns or after terrorist attacks?

What has Stephen Kaufer said about his vision for the business?

TripAdvisor

Recently started studying TripAdvisor. Key questions I plan on diving in to:

How is mobile impacting how people book travel?
What are trends in the competitive landscape?

  • OTA: Priceline, Expedia
  • Metasearch: Trivago, Kayak, C Trip, Hotels Combined
  • Large Online Search (basically meta-search): Google, Bing, Yahoo, Baidu, Facebook, Alibaba, Amazon
  • Restaurants: Yelp, OpenTable (Priceline)
  • Vacation Rentals (Airbnb, Homeaway (Expedia))

What are competitors saying about TRIP in their transcripts?
Also, use SimilarWeb Analysis here
Consider strength of UGC communities

  • Yelp (restaurants); Trip (travel); Zocdoc (doctors); Amazon (items)

Key metrics to analyze

  • Supply side: number of hotels, number of vacation rentals, number of restaurants, number of activities
  • Engagement indicators: number of reviews, candid traveler photos, places to stay, contributions per minute

What are the dynamics of hotel usage vs. alternative accomodations (Airbnb)

  • Easy booking with no human intermediaries

What is sustainability and dynamics associated with Priceline and Expedia partnerships?

  • Google Hotel Ads making significant inroads in TripAdvisor space; increasing ROI on lower CPC and better traffic

What is TripAdvisor’s core demographic? (this relates to the potential success of their TV campaign); How are they doing on Social Media? How do we analyze this? For now, use SimilarWeb and iSpotTV

How have online travel companies fared during economic downturns or after terrorist attacks?

  • We’ll analyze this on CapIQ

What has Stephen Kaufer said about his vision for the business?

AMZN and Staples Equities

Selected stocks impacted by Amazon acquisition of Whole Foods

Grocers

  • Kroger
  • Walgreens
  • Costco
  • Wal Mart
  • Target

Food

  • McCormick
  • Conagra
  • General Mills

Potential Interlopers

  • WalMart, Kroger, Albertsons
  • “I wouldnt be surprised if every grocery store has an emergency board meeting this weekend”

Considerations for Amazon deal

  • Ability to reach customers in high-income, urban areas, where it is traditionally difficult to reach customers (and not accessible by drone)
  • Acquisition of 431 distribution centers
  • WholeFoods is only 2% of total grocery market
  • Highly synergistic with Amazon fresh
  • Amazon did not hold a conference call post deal

Unboxing Core Themes

General Themes

  • White box hardware

Red Hat

  • Acquisition of 3scale for APIs
  • RHEL is currently the cash cow
  • JBoss Middleware enables applications to speak together
  • OpenShift PaaS / rapid application development through microservices (PaaS)
  • OpenStack:

Amazon

  • Mix shift to higher profitability cloud, which is expected to be the highest portion of revenue
  • Moving upstream from SMB to enterprise
  • At recent event, had GM, Coca Cola speak, speaking to effectiveness of enterprise strategy
  • Most developers prefer AWS
  • Aurora is gaining traction (SQL database)
  • RedShift has solid traction (data warehouse)
  • Workspaces competes with VMWare and Citrix
  • Solid security in public cloud
  • Roll-out of QuickSight
  • Chosen by GuideWire for IaaS
  • Chosen by Salesforce as preferred IaaS hosting

Best-In-Class Offerings

  • ServiceNow: opportunity to also penetrate ITSM market; very strong customer renewal rates
  • ServiceNow: current beachead in service management (incident, problem, service catalog); moving to operations management (servers, application, storage, virtualization, cloud, network) – this model enables ServiceNow to penetrate a business model typically dominated by incumbents (IBM, CA, Microsoft, BMC)
  • Workday: opportunity to move down-stream to penetrate SMB market; incumbents (Oracle, SAP) slower to move to cloud)
  • Other higher growth opportunities include marketing / customer service targeting SMB space: Hubspot (inbound marketing); Zendesk (leader in customer services software)
  • Slow GDP growth resulting in investments in front office
    • Accounting / Enterprise / ERP
    • Productivity Applications
    • Sales and Marketing Applications

Market has had a defensive posture this year, positively benefiting infrastructure players

  • Red Hat
  • Oracle
  • VMWare

Value Play: BI / Analytics Uncertainty

  • Larger players increasing competition for the likes of Tableau with fears of Microsoft, Qlik, and Amazon (QuickSight) getting in the way

Red Hat Overview

Industry

  • Faster innovation cycles
  • Increased security

Positives

  • Unique open source business model
  • Low cost technology
  • Anchor: Red Hat Enterprise Linux
  • Growth lever is OpenStack adoption + storage / middleware (JBoss) + PaaS (OpenShift)
  • Positioned to be leader of OpenStack movement
  • Positioned to deliver OpenStack across AWS and Azure
  • Increasing deal sizes
  • High renewal and fast growing renewal rates

Risks

  • Susceptible to decreased IT spend (in poor economic environment)
  • Ability to de-throne Microsoft
  • Growth is driven by non-RHEL products
  • Move to public cloud could make AWS linux more appealing
  • Most customers are from indirect sales channels
  • New products being adopted slower than expected

Updates

  • Increased headcount this year

AAP Cost Structure

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Follow Up

  • How AAP makes money
  • Components of COGS (Sankey)
  • Components of SGA (Sankey)