SAP (Nasdaq: SAP) made an uncharacteristic move yesterday by announcing that it is acquiring French company Business Objects (Nasdaq: BOBJ) for $6.78 Billion. The $59 a share price being offered is a 20% premium over Friday’s closing price for the Business Intelligence market leader. I had said in an earlier column, that SAP’s strategy would
SM: What are some of your key learnings from this journey so far? SS: The journey has been very interesting. More technology start-ups didn’t survive the dot-com bust. We were able to weather the downturn and adapt to the environment. We adjusted the management team, adjusted the focus on applications and with a bit of
SM: How big is the market? How do you calculate TAM? What is your business model? UM: One way to calculate TAM is by the money available to spend today on sales intelligence. This includes licenses to database information, such as Hoover’s. There’s about $5-10 billion spent today on this in the US market alone.
One of the things I did when I designed the Intarka product was that I went and interviewed tons of really good sales people to understand the various kinds of tactics they use to prospect. To this day, this experience has always helped me in my various business development activities, and has today become second
SM. What was the market landscape like when you founded the company? Competition? Competitive Positioning? UM: The market landscape did not include any “true” competitors at that time and still do not today. InsideView represents a unique technology that uses Web 3.0-type features to address sales issues in the enterprise. Although they aren’t true competitors,
While we have been revising the Enterprise 3.0 definition, and introducing sales methodology into the framework, I thought it would be a good time to drill down into certain aspects of Sales, and explore some best practices. With that goal, I first bring you an interview with a company called InsideView that focuses on making
So the variable I talked about adding to the Enterprise 3.0 formula is Small Medium Enterprise (SME). Why is SME important? You’ve heard me say this before. But let me reiterate. For one thing, there are 25 Million of them, with an enormous spending power. To give you an example of a software company that
I wrote a framework piece defining next generation Enterprise software, and wrote a number of derivative pieces on the subject about specific companies. Just like we added to the Web 3.0 framework last week, this week we need to add to the Enterprise 3.0 framework as well. But first, here’s the recap. Definition: Enterprise 3.0