41–50 of 54 posts
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ESP - Email service provider. Sort of like Constant Contact, but for enterprise. We send about a million email newsletters a day through them.
So, spammers then.
Here's some perspective from someone deep within the Salesforce ecosystem: Salesforce has very concretely and deliberately pursued the "imperial" approach in the B2B/Enterprise market, which is to do a careful survey of existing products in a particular space, the potential revenue to be gained from expanding into that space, and what is needed to get a heads up on existing products. As is generally the case in the e…
"Salesforce has done this extremely effectively, from salesforce automation, to customer relations management, to customer service, etc. In many cases now it is virtually unimaginable not to use Salesforce, since the feature set is so extensive." This is the same strategy that Microsoft has pursued for years - and it sometimes works and sometimes doesn't - MSFT going after Intuit comes to mind, as does their own Sale…
Oracle is perhaps a better example of how well it can work than Microsoft. Ellison has openly admitted his strategy was acquired from the Office approach that Microsoft leveraged. Oracle has spent a huge pile of money, far more than Microsoft, in consolidating their space, and all without having a monopoly to lean on.
I would comment on this, but DHH has captured my thoughts nearly exactly on Twitter today: http://twitter.com/dhh This is insane. $2.5b for a company that has lost money through its existence, has a very small set of (likely not-so-diverse) clients (6,000ish), and makes 10% of what they paid for them in revenue ? Strikes me as a crazy purchase, but perhaps there's something else afoot that I don't see. I've been prov…
Buying ExactTarget adds 6000 more prospects/customers that Salesforce can sell to. Assuming that it signs up a fraction of those to use Salesforce Service Cloud or Data.com or any of the other Salesforce products, that's more money and helps justify the price. Oracle has been doing this for years (and probably where Benioff got his playbook) They buy up a company, fold in their customers and cross-sell their other pr…
As a company "born Cloud", Salesforce have had to make sure their integration capabilities have been up to snuff, and other vendors have been able to leverage those integrations to reach Salesforce customers via the AppExchange (similar to the App Store).
So the capability of using Salesforce whilst using other apps with integration has been a capability for a while, and so customers could tailor their own solutions to their needs, budgets etc. Except that more and more, customers want the one-back-to-pat/one-neck-to-strangle, and the associated 'one-solution, no integration' benefits. Hence Salesforce have been parking their tanks on the lawns of service providers. When asked for features, Salesforce response is sometimes "There's an app for that", however sometimes the demand for them to provide certain functionality is so great, or the opportunity large enough, that they'll enter a market in this fashion. They're currently doing something similar with identity management. Ping Identity had a solution they could sell you, but soon they'll have to compete with Salesforce Identity.
Competing with someone who hosts the platform you're working on is possible, but it's definitely a disadvantage.
The other factor here is what the other players are up to - Oracle recently purchased Eloqua, and for those of us in the Salesforce line of work, an acquisition like this has been expected for the last few months. Email marketing is an area in which Salesforce has been weak for some time, they didn't want to do it because it's not their core focus, and hey, "there are apps for that". But once Oracle moved, Salesforce were going to follow suit to block that advantage.
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That may not matter -- in fact, most companies that take on VC money are not profitable for quite awhile, with the expectation that in the long term, the business will be enormous. Before making the judgement that "psh, they're not profitable", be sure the vectors look right. For example, have they been making that margin smaller and smaller, and is the revenue getting larger and larger? If so, then they're fine in t…
We don't have any insight into their financials as far as margins etc. We do know they had raised $188MM, and had purchased 3 companies (according to CB anyway). My personal take on this, after looking at their funding history briefly - had their margins been getting smaller, they wouldn't have had to continue raising round after round. I don't get the fascination with subsidized revenue growth - almost anyone can do…
The larger issue is that short term profitability is not the only thing to look at. It should certainly be one thing to consider, but there are lots of examples of companies that became enormous after a long period of unprofitability. And since ET has so much revenue and only 7% loss compared to that revenue, I can totally see how this would be a good investment for Salesforce.
We're the little guy competing against ExactTarget. I had no idea their business wasn't profitable. From their customers who have reached out to me, it seems that for web businesses to integrate with them there are huge complexities (like mirroring your production database, and having ET engineers write custom code for you). Even with all this they've clearly been successful on the revenue front. With an acquisition…
We do not focus on profit, but instead focus on revenue. This is the same model as SalesForce and Amazon.
I would comment on this, but DHH has captured my thoughts nearly exactly on Twitter today: http://twitter.com/dhh This is insane. $2.5b for a company that has lost money through its existence, has a very small set of (likely not-so-diverse) clients (6,000ish), and makes 10% of what they paid for them in revenue ? Strikes me as a crazy purchase, but perhaps there's something else afoot that I don't see. I've been prov…
This has allowed ExactTarget to spend more money on developers (like me), products, and to acquire other businesses.
If I make $1 a year that means I earned $21 million and one dollars more than this company did last year.
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Not sure I agree that Marketo's business is unsustainable - clearly they want to make more headway in the B2C space; the B2B Marketing Automation market would seem to be saturated, but I would argue that there's still plenty of growth for them for the next 3-5 years, at a minimum. As far as I can tell, ExactTarget's marketing automation capabilities vastly pale in comparison to Marketo or Eloqua, I could be wrong tho…
something like 90%+ of Marketo's customers integrate it with Salesforce. Of course Salesforce won't just cut them off if they have a competitor tool, due to anti-trust issues, but it doesn't necessarily bode well for Marketo now that Salesforce owns a competitor. Pardot is a fairly small piece of Exacttarget though so potentially Marketo could still be a target at some point. Larger scale B2C marketing automation is…
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Provided Salesforce's internal sales teams and enterprise consultants can effectively promote ExactTarget as a new addition to the product platform to Salesforce customers that hitherto hadn't considered it, the actual details of the level of integration are of secondary importance.
My own experience is that their internal sales teams and enterprise consultants are separate islands based on the product and they are very poor at cross-selling. We're a pretty decent size Salesforce.com customer and they have never even attempted to sell us other services. Not Radian6, not Buddy Media - hell, we had to ask them about Data.com. So I'm doubting their ability to cross-sell. And then the integration is…