ServiceNow’s Growth Mantras: AI, Verticals

Under the leadership of its newest CEO Bill McDermott, ServiceNow (NYSE: NOW) recently reported a stellar quarter. The company outperformed market expectations for the quarter on all fronts, sending the stock soaring to a record high.

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Facebook Explores Payments and Commerce

Facebook’s (Nasdaq: FB) battle with privacy concerns are far from over. The company recently announced that it had settled a class action lawsuit by paying $550 million in fine, and it was also slapped with a $5 billion fine for privacy abuses by the Federal Trade Commission. Despite this, its quarterly results surpassed market expectations. Facebook is also looking at expanding its service offerings to e-commerce and payments to drive growth.

PaaS: Platform Vendors Need to Avoid Lumpy Revenues

In my recent post How PaaS Impacts The Stock Prices Of SaaS Companies, I mentioned an equation:

Some numbers: Let us say, a SaaS platform vendor succeeds in facilitating 100 small companies to achieve $10M in ARR each. That would add up to $1 billion ARR cumulative. 30% of this, or $300 million ARR comes back to the company as platform fees. This, conceivably, amounts to a $3 billion market cap enhancement for the PaaS vendor.

The reality often is somewhat different. 

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Google’s Cloud Bets Are Paying Off

Like other tech giants, Google’s parent, Alphabet (Nasdaq: GOOG) too has crossed into the trillion-dollar market cap territory. This was even though the recently announced fourth quarter results did little to impress the markets. Alphabet fell short of the market’s revenue expectations while it managed to scrape past the earnings estimates. The stock fell 5% in the after-hours trading session.

Cloud Stocks: SAP Bets Big on Experience Management

Last week, SAP (NYSE:SAP) reported results of its fourth quarter, which beat analyst expectations. The results were driven by strong cloud bookings.

Amazon Looks to India for Next Round of E-tail Growth

Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) recently announced its fourth quarter results that surpassed all market expectations. For a short moment, post the announcement of the results, the company even went into the trillion-dollar valuation territory. However, it failed to maintain the levels for long.

Microsoft’s Azure Strategy Pays Off

Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) appears to be on a roll on all fronts. The recently announced results sent the stock soaring to record high levels as the company delivered a stellar performance shattering all market expectations. The star of the show was its cloud offering Azure.

Apple Rides High on iPhones, Wearables, Services

Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) announced its first quarter results that put all iPhone doubters to rest. The holiday quarter saw iPhones sales surge to record high levels. With the continuing 5G revolution within the mobile segment, analysts believe iPhone sales are likely to keep growing. But it is not only the iPhones that are driving growth, Apple continued to witness growing demand for its services and wearables also.

PaaS: How PaaS Impacts the Stock Prices of SaaS Companies

I assume you have been reading my commentary on Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS). 

To recap, in SaaS Companies: You Have An Unprecedented Opportunity, I started highlighting the massive momentum in Cloud Stocks exactly two years back.

In Cloud Stocks: SaaS Companies NEED PaaS Strategy and Cloud Stocks: Calling ALL PaaS Leaders, I pointed out how PaaS is a key strategic tool in building leverage for SaaS companies.

And at the end of 2019, I published Cloud Stocks: Top 20 for 2020 with a summary of which SaaS companies are succeeding on the basis of a strong PaaS strategy. Salesforce.com (NYSE: CRM), Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT), Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN), Atlassian (NASDAQ: TEAM), ServiceNow (NYSE: NOW) – all featured on this list.

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Is Zoox Ready to Launch This Year?

According to an Allied Market Research report, the global autonomous vehicle market is expected to grow from $54.23 billion in 2019 at 40% CAGR to $556.67 billion by 2026. The autonomous vehicle market is flooded with several players ranging from traditional car manufactures such as GM and Ford to focused players such as Waymo and Zoox.