Business & Technology Nexus

I’ve been back in the saddle for a little over 3 months. The Sun acquisition is moving along & we are up to our ears in interesting challenges. I wish I was in a position to share more. One item I can share is Oracle’s improvements on the environmental side – from 100% compostable containers for food, auto double-siding printing, etc etc. It’s fantastic.

After getting Coupa off the ground many of my friends and colleagues predicted I would return to Oracle.

They were right.

I loved working at Oracle the first time around. And now that I’ve co-founded my own enterprise software firm I feel I have much more to contribute.

It should be interesting to watch how Oracle navigates the disruptive on-demand software movement, how “Fusion” is received in the marketplace, and how their first foray into computer hardware fares.

But I will do more than watch. I’m ready to roll up my sleeves and help.

Is any software company out there truly deserving of being called “high” tech any more? What happens etymologically when upstart high tech companies compete over the span of decades & commoditize space after space after space. At some point shouldn’t we stop associating them with the “high” part of high-tech? And when do software firms in those spaces sink down low enough to be called “low” tech? (If you’re thinking CA, you’re not alone) :)

Wordplay aside, doesn’t it seem like the price of many types of software technology is headed towards zero?

A friend of mine in the venture community argues yes. He summarized his view this way: “It’s really hard to build new software technology and then convince people to ascribe value to it. These days, it’s better to instead use software technology to sell people things they already ascribe value to.”

I’ve been wondering whether there is data to support his point of view. In fact, the first few paragraphs of this post have just been sitting in WordPress while I looked around.

Just today I stumbled across an analysis of SuccessFactors that was worth a quick look. Here is a link to the article, entitled: Success Factors: Going for Break-Even Rather than Revenue Growth?

The assertion the author makes is “Increasingly, it looks like SAAS providers will have a tougher and long winding road to sustainable profits and continuous top-line growth.” I hope it will turn out that newer enterprise software vendors will find a path to profitability through reducing the cost of customer acquisition. But the days of being able to claim “it’s a land grab, take share now & profits later” seem to be drawing to a close in this particular software technology space.

Because the cost of developing software is racing to zero every bit as fast as some markets commoditize, it does seem possible to find nooks and crannies of high margin businesses. But these businesses, it would seem, will be more and more specialized & therefore the prospective markets will likewise be smaller.

There does seem to be another path to profitability besides the choice to serve niche markets: outsourced services.

More on that later.

Well, the news of my separation from Coupa has begun to circulate.

I imagine anytime a founder leaves a company it’s tough. It certainly was for me. But as Steve Jobs once said, if you wake up too many mornings in a row not feeling passionate about what you are working on, you need to change what you are working on!

I continue to have confidence in Coupa, its product, and its mission. I’m very proud of what the company has accomplished over the past few years. I believe in Coupa’s management team, respect Coupa’s investors, and think the Coupa solution is the best on the market for automating and controlling indirect procurement for the mid-market.

As for what’s next for me, it just may be a very long (think Forrest Gump) bike ride. And after that, we shall see..

Back in late July I wrote a quick entry about Google’s interest in the wireless spectrum auction to be conducted shortly. It’s here.

Marguerite Reardon has a write-up over at C|Net that makes some interesting assertions about how Google might use the spectrum should they win. It’s worth a read. The synopsis is that Google would shy away from becoming a nuts-and-bolts wireless operator and instead use the spectrum as a platform – enlisting a broader market & the inevitable competitive forces that come with it rather than going it alone.

It’s hard for me to see this as anything other than an insurance policy against all the advertising dollars moving from computers and laptops to phones. Just like the gphone specification & application foundation. But even without the altruism, it’s smart business.

d  

We (Coupa Software, my on demand e-Procurement company) just recovered from a really interesting journey down the rabbit hole. We got some pretty great advice from an SEO specialist on how to improve our search engine rankings so we’d be more “findable” for keywords we cared about.

So we built up a keyword list and proceeded to stack our web pages with keyword-matching content. And we really did improve in the rankings. But there’s a side effect you expose yourself to when you do this: you can lose the “soul” of your company. Said another way, if you are operating in competitive markets you can lose what is special about your company and its solutions.

Recently, we formally unveiled something Coupa had been working on for a long time – our on demand offering. And we re-did the website again – this time valuing visitors time more than SEO. The results are interesting. Web visitors are down marginally, and leads are down too. But the quality of leads is soaring & closed business is up.

What’s the lesson? Imho, brand identity can’t be sacrificed for site traffic.This isn’t an indictment against SEO – and truth be told we are now working to improve our rankings on the new site. But this time it’s with our eyes wide open – knowing that uniqueness in our market – and making information gathering incredibly convenient for our prospects and customers – trumps moving up a spot or two in the rankings.

No doubt there are folks that will read this and disagree viscerally to what I’m saying – but I sure believe this was a lesson worth sharing. Don’t sacrifice your brand for SEO – or you may find all your key marketing indicators are headed up while sales are diving down.

-d