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