Happy Friday! We hope your week was better than it was for several public enterprise tech companies - namely Cloudera, Pivotal, and Zuora - as their stocks plummeted after disappointing earnings reports.
Shares of Cloudera, the enterprise Hadoop company, traded at an all-time low, tumbling 41% after both the CEO, Tom Reilly, and Cloudera co-founder, Mike Olson, abruptly announced their departure. As enterprises move more towards cloud offerings from Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, Cloudera’s growth and relevance has become untenable even after its highly publicized merger with arch-rival Hortonworks.
Similarly, shares of enterprise tech vendor Pivotal Software saw its market cap fall 41% to $3 billion, and shares of subscription software company Zuora also tanked last Friday after the company reported earnings that missed Wall Street expectations. On their earnings call, Zuora’s CEO Tien Tzuo admitted the need to completely overhaul their go-to-market strategy, focusing on their sales
organization, pipeline, and having more predictable sales bookings.
This go-to-market topic is particularly timely, as our Work-Bench team is fresh off hosting 50 enterprise seed founders at our first-ever Enterprise GTM Summit this past Wednesday in SF, where we served up a master class in tactics you won’t find on blogs to pitch, win, and close enterprise customers. We’ll be sharing more highlights from our conference next week.
Lastly, it wasn’t all doom and gloom in the enterprise tech world this week. Even with Google facing antitrust scrutiny, they announced intent to acquire data analytics company Looker for $2.6 billion. Looker will help bolster Google’s cloud-computing capabilities by providing customers an end-to-end analytics platform to connect, collect, analyze and visualize data in the cloud.
— Priyanka Somrah
Cloudera Struggles Highlight Rapid Rise of Public Cloud
CIO Journal • "The emergence of the public cloud is threatening companies that offer technologies and computing models once considered indispensable for applications such as analytics and databases. Cloudera Inc., an early player in the open-source software framework Hadoop, saw its shares plummet this week on news that Chief..."
Microsoft and Amazon Took a Look at Looker before Google’s $2.6 Billion Purchase
CNBC • "After Google cloud chief Thomas Kurian approached data analytics company Looker about a potential tie-up earlier this year, Looker turned to a familiar face in Silicon Valley for advice: Frank Quattrone. Quattrone’s investment bank, Qatalyst Partners, shopped around for potential bidders and got interest from companies..."
What’s Been Lacking at Google’s Cloud? Enough Humans
WSJ • "Weeks into his new job as head of Google’s cloud business, Thomas Kurian identified a chief complaint from big business customers: They often didn’t have account managers to call. Understanding corporate customers is precisely why Google hired Mr. Kurian, who spent two decades at longtime adversary and competitor..."
‘Talent War’ at Home Prompts U.S. Employers to Take Another Look Abroad
CIO Journal • "U.S. companies racing to tap artificial intelligence and other high-tech tools face a shortage of workers at home who have hands-on experience, managers and recruiters say. That is prompting some to take a closer look at the pool of skilled digital workers outside the U.S., many of whom are willing to uproot for the right job..."
CIOs Crack Open the ‘Black Box’ of Tech Productivity
CIO Journal • "Chief information officers are using tools to get a bird’s-eye view of their organizations’ productivity in an effort to cut costs, generate revenue and improve efficiency. Instead of relying on meetings with teams or spending months tracking down how employees are using companywide software applications and internal..."
