Techaisle Analyst Insights

In India, SMBs’ awareness of cloud computing trails only slightly behind mature markets. Predictably, awareness is significantly higher among mid-market businesses than small businesses. However, awareness of the term increases significantly among companies with 20 or more employees suggesting interest in cloud computing jumps once businesses grow beyond a certain size. In addition, mid-market businesses with 250-999 employees have the highest awareness about cloud computing as these firms have are still building their in-house IT infrastructure and are evaluating all options to meet their IT needs. SMBs also agree largely on what the term means – about half of all SMBs surveyed agreed that the term included all of the following aspects.

• Subscribe to IT services that are hosted by third-party

• Subscribe to Servers hosted by a third-party

• Subscribe to applications hosted by third-party

• Access applications using a web based interface

• Subscribe to storage and security hosted and provided by third parties

Over the last few years, as the market has evolved and more vendors have entered the fray, a number of new terms have become commonplace each meant to either truly represent a component of the market or a marketing gimmick by some vendors to try and create and legitimize a niche for themselves. The rising sophistication of SMBs is evident in that they are at least familiar with the various terms being bandied about. This is not to say that SMBs do not differ in their views of what each term actually means.

Familiarity with the term cloud computing is rising among SMBs suggesting vendors’ evangelism activities are having some effect in terms of recognition and awareness. However, a good understanding of the benefits of cloud computing varies significantly among the SMBs. More importantly, awareness among channels that serve the SMB segment is limited with pockets of misinformation. Even if the SMBs and channels know about the benefits of cloud computing they still worry about security and data privacy.

Cloud computing has been touted as the next big thing but as far as the Indian market is concerned while there is a lot of hype and interest generated around this technology the ground realities reflect a more sobering truth: that SMBs in India are still some way off from shifting to the cloud in a big way and that the initial vendor push is more oriented to the upper mid-market businesses and large enterprises.

In India, Infrastructure, also known as IaaS, has the potential to change the way IT hardware is purchased, designed and used. With its promise of infinite scalability and a pay-as-you-go pricing model, the primary benefit that cloud IaaS services extends to the SMBs is efficiency at lower IT costs. It lowers the barriers to market growth by lowering technology costs and upfront investments. This is true both for small and mid-market businesses for many applications. The picture is substantially different for mid-market businesses and small businesses taken separately. Mid-market businesses display a greater willingness to adopt hosted infrastructure and platform solutions than small businesses which is understandable.  Small businesses prefer business appliacations and industry vertical solutions. Cloud platform vendors should therefore actively seek partnerships with such vertical ISVs in order to drive utilization of their own services and data center resources.

Gitika Bajaj
Techaisle

“Clouds come floating into my life, no longer to carry rain or usher storm,
but to add color to my sunset sky.”
- Rabindranath Tagore

The Global SMB Cloud Computing market will reach $23.5B this year and double to $47B by 2016, according to our latest forecast which is being updated using several thousands of survey responses and results of and segmentation and predictive analytics studies conducted in the first three quarters of 2012.

Rapid market growth in the Cloud Computing arena, especially for SMBs, is not a surprise to those watching the market, but our latest forecast shows that several segments will offer more than $1B in opportunity, as shown in the attached chart. Among those that will cross the $1B threshold are Other SaaS, ERP/SCM and Storage, the latter growing at ~30% CAGR. Keep in mind that the five types of arrows show relative growth relationships; the actual rates are very healthy and range from 10% to over 30%.

Other important points in the forecast include:

Approximately 60% of the volume growth is expected to come from North American SMBs, or $14B of the incremental volume of the global $23B, while Western Europe is expected to add $3.7B growing at a rate of 11%, and Asia/Pacific (excluding Japan) continues to develop rapidly – in the 20% range - on the back of China’s expansion and Korea’s continued economic strength in IT and global production, and is expected to add almost as much total volume as Western Europe, or about $3.4B vs. the $3.7B mentioned above.

Eastern Europe is expected to develop into a ~$1B market over the forecast period as is Latin America, both growing rapidly from a relatively small base. And as has historically been the case, Africa and the Middle East continue to lag with a very small share of both volume and growth.

“A picture is worth a thousand words.”
- Napoleon Bonapart

With all the movement around VDI, as analysts we tend to think in abstract terms about what is means to the market at large and our clients. With my daughter home from college this week I got a firsthand look at what the next generation is doing with technology and how real it actually is.

The scenario went like this:

With a week before finals in Organic Chemistry and a major paper due after Thanksgiving break, my daughter needed some freeware called ChemSketch, but it does not run native on her MacBook. Nonplussed, she downloaded an Oracle VirtualBox client, Windows XP, and the ChemSketch, created a new system disk and shared folder and was working on her chemistry paper, drawing molecules and all the other things that I don’t pretend to understand.  While I was proud to see how quickly she overcame the problem, what really struck me was that thirty years ago I was in front of a blinking CRT using a timeshare network learning FORTRAN with a prompt – the C: prompt that my daughter used triggered the memory and caused a major episode of deja vu. It is really amazing to see how both the context and content change over time.

We at Techaisle want to wish all of our friends a Happy Thanksgiving and  beginning of the Holiday Season!

We have covered Marketing Automation as a major topic, especially through the Techaisle SMB Marketing Automation Study conducted in US, UK, Germany and several blog posts, commenting on the rapid growth and consolidation in the market. In one fell swoop Oracle is now addressing a US$3.5 billion opportunity in the US by 2015 and US$6.0 billion opportunity globally.

Oracle’s announcement that it would acquire Eloqua for $871M, a leading Marketing Automation vendor, seems a little odd at first, mainly because majority of Eloqua’s customers are said to be using Salesforce.com as their CRM platform, and because Oracle competes with Siebel-on-Demand and recently released its’ own Fusion CRM product.

In the typical Oracle fashion of acquiring existing market leaders, i.e. Siebel Systems, PeopleSoft and JDE, Oracle snatched up another jewel for the Ellison crown, apparently valuing B2B and Enterprise-level functionality over SMB and Social Media Marketing automation that have been the focus of arch-rival Salesforce.com. It also sends a message to Redmond, whose recent acquisition of MarketingPilot seems to offer a substantial list of features and functions, but does not carry the weight of Eloqua’s brand. In the short term, it kind of looks like a mixed bag; the repercussions of the purchase seem to revolve along these areas:

SMB Customers:

1)     Oracle says they will continue to support third party applications, but they have a huge vested interest in on-premise CRM in Siebel and other solutions that will compete for resources,

2)     Enterprise customers who still have a staff to manage applications may be open to another level of integration with a combined Fusion/Eloqua/Siebel offer, but for those SMBs already on SFDC, it is very unlikely that there would be a compelling reason to move from SaaS to an on-premise model; getting away from capital purchases, IT headcount, maintenance fees and software upgrades was the main reason for going with Salesforce.com from the beginning. Same for those who are already managing their marketing campaigns and customer communication programs using Eloqua; it is hard to take that away without some revenue risk and employee dissatisfaction.

3)      In a recent Techaisle survey, 77% of SMBs interviewed stated they were looking for vendors to reduce complexity. The type and level of integration of Eloqua into the larger Siebel suite will either make things more or less complicated depending on the approach taken by product managers to create a seamless experience.

Competitors:

4)     Oracle denies access to Eloqua’s technology to Salesforce.com, which would have been a very good fit both in terms of customer acquisition/migration and start up culture. This may well be the most important (short-term) advantage gained by Oracle. This moves Marketo, SliverPop and others up the ladder as the large independents in the space, with Hubspot and Marketo obvious next-in-line M&A targets, in a market that has seen scores of start-ups, mergers and acquisitions over the past few years.

5)     Despite a 30% premium paid by Oracle for Eloqua ($23/share over the market $17), there is already a class action suit alleging that the board should have shopped a buyer more aggressively, suggesting a $27 price as more reasonable. No comment.

6)     Over the longer term the implications are larger in a market that is moving fast, which will be influenced increasingly by Big Data, Automation and Optimization -  Enterprise capabilities to compete with the big players like IBM,  Salesforce.com and  SAP, who will be bringing competition and automation to a new level in the next few years. A recent Wikibon Post is a good example of how hardware and software are evolving to meet these emerging real time challenges. The post describes how fast the bar is rising in optimization in general and online advertising in particular:

“Many commercial Web publishers make space available on their Web pages for banner and display advertisements. Typically, when a user opens such a Web page, the browser reaches out to an online ad exchange network and requests an ad unit to serve to that user. The ad exchange broadcasts this information, often enriched with behavior data specific to the user in question, to multiple advertisers. Each advertiser compares the information against its internal ad inventory and existing ad campaigns to determine what that ad impression is "worth" to them. It then decides whether to place a bid and at what amount. Bids are returned to the ad exchange, which determines who the highest bidder is and delivers the winning advertisement.”
- Wikibon

All without noticeable lag to the user. These are the kind of industrial strength capabilities that are on the way as the market compounds at almost 130%, dominated by Mobile spending as devices grow by the hundreds of millions, as shown in this Kleiner-Perkins forecast.

Who’s Next?

So in our opinion this is a significant acquisition for Oracle, mainly because Eloqua has a strong base of satisfied users and a strong brand, and strong technology that can be applied to Oracle’s stack in the long run. The $871M price tag was not enough to prevent a lawsuit for some shareholders, but represents a sizable investment for Oracle as they strive to define the ultimate Customer-Centric, Multi-Channel Relationship Management platform in their race against the large horizontal vendors in the space (IBM, SAP, SAS, Google, Teradata).  To this end Oracle has acquired eight companies in the last two years (ATG, FatWire. Endeca, RightNow, Inquira, Vitrue, Collective Intellect, and finally with this announcement, Eloqua). The scope of what used to be called the “360ᴼ customer perspective” has evolved to include pre-sales, sales, post-sales, customer service and lifetime customer value application components, with a relentless push to automate and integrate each piece of the puzzle.

In the wake of this acquisition, an obvious question is who's next? As mentioned earlier, Marketo is an obvious choice, as are Silverpop Hubspot, Responsys, and others.  Will SFDC respond in kind or continue to focus on the lower end of the market and Social Media acquisitions? Regardless, we think 2013 will continue to see a rich market for Marketing Automation M&A activity, following two years that have seen scores of transactions in the space.

 

One of the areas we watch most is the evolving needs of the SMB customer, who is being consistently pressured to speed up all core business processes while simultaneously reducing costs, generally  through the introduction of new technologies and specifically by adopting Cloud Computing approaches.

Looking Forward to SDN and SDDC  

Among Mid-Market companies (between 500 and 999 employees) recently interviewed, over 75% described their business being completely “Network Dependent” with a large share planning to move beyond Virtualization to Software-Defined-Networking (SDN) and Software-Defined-Data-Centers (SDDC).  Almost all had implemented Remote Managed Services (RMS), Cloud Computing, and Server Virtualization or VDI.

“Yes, I have heard about it (SDN) and we even tested it on one of our servers. We can get the software easily but we need to get proper hardware implementation as well and that too keeping our costs in control. So, both the things need to be evaluated. Yes, probably we would be investing in it, in the coming future. There are many things that are a concern for us right now, like cost, space and efficiency. So we need things that could help us in these areas.” - 900 Employee SMB IT Decision Maker

Mid-Market Reliance on Outsouced  IT Support

As we have written in the past, the larger SMB customers are more likely to rely on channel partners or vendor direct relationships to free up lean SMB IT departments and allow them to do more with less by supporting the research and selection process, and then testing and implementing the solutions, especially for those solutions involving a high level of configuration and remote management capabilities. The speed that specialists bring to the configuration, testing and implementation tend to outweigh the costs and speed up the decision cycle.

“Yes, the channel partners had a huge role. I sat down with their Cisco engineers and we looked over the changes we were going to make, then we did put together a business case, as to why we needed to upgrade or make changes to the system and what benefit it would result in. They were helpful and they made things look easier for us.” - 750 Employee SMB IT Decision Maker

New Functionality is driving Adoption

As we move into the Late Majority of SMB Cloud Adopters, there is less perceived risk and enough pressure to move companies toward implementing the architecture, if only to remain competitive.

"Now there are products available with better features and are cost effective. Earlier the cost of moving to the cloud was higher. Now because of the tough competition, the costs have marginally decreased. So, these things are enticing to look at different solutions. When we moved on to the cloud there were various benefits like cost effectiveness, in terms of IT management perspective. Previously it required 10 people, but now it can be done with 2 people. Previously the concept of datacenters was not that…important…, but now people are getting rid of the existing hardware and are moving towards datacenters to host most of their things that are in their offices. The datacenter costs are also competitive. If we look at any datacenter today and what they used to offer 5 years back, there has been a significant drop in prices due to the competition in the market.” - 500 Employee SMB IT Decision Maker

Budgets Continue to be Tight

We also see a significant effort on the part of customers to extend the life of the existing equipment and upgrade only the parts that are needed to achieve specific objectives such as 10GB capacity, which may require more robust firewalls, routers and switches, especially in those moving to VOIP. Typically we saw a reluctance to spend until it was necessary.

“Management here is very price conscious; they did not see the value of doing these things in the first place. The major factors were to increase speed and the reach of the network. So by these upgrades, we were able to demonstrate increased speed and increased network segmentation.” - 750 Employee SMB IT Decision Maker

Brand Importance Increases with Size of Company

While in certain areas such as SaaS, SMB end customers tend to be less likely to consider Brand as the key decision criterion, in the area of Networking among Mid-Market firms, virtually all said Brand was very important in their decision, mostly because of the expected service level associated with larger vendors but also to provide cover in a crowded market:

"There are a thousand solutions available in the market, but we had to ensure that what we chose was the best solution available and were cost effective. The new technology and the need to expand our business base were the main factors that drove the change.” - 900 Employee SMB IT Decision Maker

“Brand perception is very important because the management is not very technology minded, so to have a big name like Cisco was important to them. We depend on our channel partners for networking support or for help with windows server and Citrix products. They are our trusted partners.” - ~1,000 Employee SMB IT Decision Maker

Re-enforcing this tendency to Brand, the majors in the market were cited repeatedly as go-to Vendors. Cisco got the most mentions by far, followed by Citrix, Microsoft, HP, Juniper and Dell. As seen in the quote on outsourced support above, the vendors can also help in creating a business case.

“Well, I guess some of the ones (increase share) would be Cisco, HP, Dell and Microsoft. The major ones I know are trying to get there, if they are not close. It’s very hard to say who is going to lose much (share), but probably Microsoft or Apple are going to lose some. ~800 Employee SMB IT Decision Maker

We believe these attitudes represent some evolution that is becoming more pronounced as the market matures and intelligent networking becomes increasingly important to SMBs in general and Mid-Market companies in particular.