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June 27, 2008
Their logic baffles me...
This morning on the BBC I saw an interview of SAP's CEO, Henning Kagermann. He was expressing the fact that in today's tough economy, budgets were cut, deals were taking longer, and many companies were pushing back their investment plans. Of course as a vendor of super expensive infrastructure software, SAP is taking a big hit.
In order to compensate for this decrease in initial purchases, SAP is rising maintenance prices. I guess they did the math: less clients x higher cost = constant revenue.
At the same time, Oracle announces both a price hike, as described by Gavin Clarke in The Register, and record quarterly results - the latter making sense given their acquisition spree of the past 3 years and all the cost (and talent) cutting they did in acquired companies.
But where is the logic in all this? As Bertrand said in this post, there probably isn't any - except that customers are locked in! Pretty much like Air France 20 years ago, which was in a situation of monopoly on the French domestic market and could dictate their prices, until low cost airlines such as Easyjet or Ryanair and the TGV came along. Check Air France's promotional costs today - at least for the destinations where they have competitors: they are pretty compelling. But it took Air France quite some time to adjust, and a few years ago they were not in such a good shape. The same holds true in the US, look at AA, UA, or DL and how they reacted to JetBlue or SouthWest. Or how they managed to crush the new low-cost, all-business-class airlines flying from London to NY, but this is another story...
So are SAP and Oracle the legacy airlines of software? And in this case, are open source vendors the low cost carriers? And will legacy vendors adjust some day, or get crushed by open source? Or will they crush open source? I don't think either model will drive the other one out of business. A balance will establish itself. But the more proprietary vendors try to squeeze the last cent out of their clients, the more this balance will tip toward open source.
So, Herr Kagermann, here is a suggestion for you. Start to charge your US customers in Euros, you revenue will jump by 60% overnight. Why? Because you can!
And Larry, one for you too. Index the cost of your software on the price of the oil barrel. Who's going complain? You have them by the balls!
And as an open source vendor, I won't complain either, you can rest assured.
Posted by Yves de Montcheuil at 2:00 AM | Comments (0)
June 25, 2008
And now... on YouTube!
The videocast the B-Eye-Network recorded at TDWI in Chicago, where I was being interviewed by Claudia Imhoff, is now live on YouTube! Check it out.
They had to split it into 2 parts:
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Posted by Yves de Montcheuil at 2:45 AM | Comments (0)
June 12, 2008
The 451 Group's summit in London
It was raining in France (of course since Lille "c'est dans le Nord Pas de Calais") but the weather was absolutely gorgeous on other side of the Channel when I made a day trip these last week to attend The 451 Group's Enterprise Computing Strategies Summit Europe.
I first got to discover the new Eurostar terminal at St Pancras' (a proof that I don't go to London as often as I used to, since the terminal has been open for 6 months now I believe) and I have to say it's nicely done. Plus, Lille-London in 80 minutes is just great.
Interesting summit, well organized, with fantastic networking opportunities. Lots of high profile VCs, senior IT management from large European firms, and vendors representatives like me. Content wise, virtualization, security, and a few other topics.
The most interesting part of the event was the ability to network with other attendees and with the analysts. I got some quality time with Raven Zachary and Matt Aslett - both key people for Talend to cultivate.
Of course their Boston summit in the Fall is bigger, with 2 days of sessions, parallel tracks, and dedicated open source sessions. Will be interesting to see how this plays out!
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Posted by Yves de Montcheuil at 6:45 AM | Comments (1)
June 6, 2008
SugarCRM partnership and integration
Nice blog post from Clint at SugarCRM about Talend's business connector for SugarCRM. As Clint clearly understood, SugarCRM needs to coexist with other applications in the information system: databases, other business apps, accounting, BI... and this is what data integration is about. Talend's 250 connectors offer support to pretty much any technology in the IT stack.
Posted by Yves de Montcheuil at 10:45 AM | Comments (0)
June 4, 2008
You know your company is a leader when...
You know you work for a market leader when...
- your company is mentioned as a competitor whenever they talk about the 500-pound gorilla
- your direct competitors aren't even listed in the same article
- other products in similar categories play catchup with yours by adding connectors and partnerships they should have had in the first place
- your CEO and co-founder is invited to debate with the Prime Minister of your country (and "your country" is one the majority of people know where it is on the map) - yes, I am planning to get more mileage out of this one ;-)
- your VP of marketing (yours truly) gets interviewed/podcasted/videocasted by industry experts wherever he goes - Chicago, Munich, Paris...
- your sales guys are signing one new customer per day
- your product has been downloaded 250,000 times and the above mentioned 500-pound gorilla only has 3,000 customers
Next step: becoming a household name. Which will be proven true when my wife won't have anymore to explain to her friends what the heck "open source data integration" is about, beside flying around the globe and working at crazy hours.
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Posted by Yves de Montcheuil at 3:45 PM | Comments (0)
The CEO, the journalist and the Prime Minister
No it's not the title of a fairy tale :-)
But the matter of the fact is that, last week, Bertrand (Talend's CEO and co-founder) was invited to a round table with Francois Fillon, France's Prime Minister, and his Minister for Digital Economy, Eric Besson (the journalist in the title is Luc Fayard who moderated the panel). Bertrand actually blogged about it on Talend's corporate blog but still, I thought I would add a few comments.
Unfortunately I couldn't attend - which might be as well, given that the room was crowded with journalists, and staffers from the government members. But I watched carefully the videos, and was impressed by the quality of the debate and the involvement of the two Ministers. Clearly, these guys get it and this is a cool example of bi-partisanship (Besson is a Socialist), as I wished there was more in French politics.
But getting it is not enough. Will they be able to do anything? The problems the economy is facing in France are so deeply rooted in the society, its corporatism, its ideology... President Sarkozy's approval ratings are tanking, as he is torn between these who think he is changing too much (the ones who want to preserve their "avantages acquis", and these who think he is not doing enough, and not fast enough.
As one of the panelists expressed it, being an entrepreneur in France is poorly regarded: a capitalist exploiting the working masses. Bertrand raised a good point about French universities (the kingdom of corporatism by excellence) that do not train their students to be entrepreneurs. I liked Bertrand's mention of Sand Hill Road, next to Stanford University, which is lined with VC firms... (for sure he knows the area, that's where he lives... and I am sure he knows many of these VCs professionally as well). When you poll French students, 7 out of 10 want to become government employees, work 35 hours weeks, and retire early. Yikes. Try the same poll at Stanford or Harvard or MIT. Yet, not all the French are like this but the ones who are not have to deal with these who are... when not everyone is rowing on a boat, it's much more difficult to beat the inertia.
I am not an entrepreneur myself - in the sense that I never created a company - and I am not sure I have what it takes. But I have almost always worked in startups and because of this I have worked very closely with several of them: Bertrand and Fabrice of course, Serge Levy (the founder of SDP, which he sold to Sybase in 1996), Anand Sundaram, Ray Wach and Yury Rapoport, the three co-founders of RSW where I worked in Boston for 3 years, Alain Dumas who founded Sunopsis... and I have a lot of respect for them. They were not all perfect, but they all managed to take a technology idea turn it into a great business.
BTW, here are links to the videos of the round table (in French):
Part 1 Part 2 Part 3
Posted by Yves de Montcheuil at 6:45 AM | Comments (0)
