Insights for IT Negotiations

Erwann Couesbot, UpperEdge’s Oracle Senior Advisor discusses common mistakes customers make when trying to assess their licenses for Oracle Technology Products, and more specifically the NUP (Named User Plus) metric Oracle uses. The top mistake is users tend to refer to their entitlements vs. how many people and devices are accessing Oracles software. Oracle doesn’t limit clients to their entitlem...

Jeff Lazarto, UpperEdge’s Workday Practice Leader gives a rundown of the top 6 things to do for Workday customers looking to expand their Workday product portfolio. Start with assessing your current deal, look at the competitiveness of your pricing and commercial terms, this will put you on good footing for negotiation leverage, especially if you have any existing pain-points or issues you’ve need...

Salesforce beat expectations with $4.87B in revenue for the quarter, which represented 30% year-over-year growth. Despite lowering their full year revenue target to $20B, a $1B reduction, the earnings call was filled with optimism. Salesforce is confident that its broad portfolio of products will enable them to lead the Fortune 500 through their accelerated digital transformations. In this podcast...

Salesforce announced the appointment of Gavin Patterson as President and Chief Revenue Officer of Salesforce. After joining Salesforce last year and quickly rising within the company, he is now the new leader of Salesforce’s global sales organization. With former co-CEO, Keith Block, stepping down earlier this year, could CEO, Marc Benioff, have a plan in place to eventually move Patterson into th...

Workday has broken up their Full-Service Equivalent (FSE) workers into different categories: Salaried Workers, Hourly Workers, Part-time Workers and Contingent Workers. Jeff Lazarto, UpperEdge’s Workday practice leader explains why it’s important to pay attention to how you categorize and breakdown your workforce based on this new structure; you can find flexibility and cost savings within it. Hos...

ServiceNow's recent earnings call showed a strong quarter and a confident Bill McDermott who emphasized the company's continued opportunity for growth in a post-COVID-19 world where companies will "embrace permanent transformation". In this podcast, Adam Mansfield, breaks down ServiceNow's "Fast-Start playbook" which features pre-packaged bundles they will be aggressively pushing onto companies. H...

Alphabet, Google’s parent company, announced their Q1 FY20 earnings which included an announcement that Google Cloud (GCP and G Suite) now has quarterly revenue of $2.78B, giving them a $11B run rate. Both GCP and G Suite continue to maintain strong growth that should not slow down any time soon based on the continued interest from enterprises. In this podcast, Adam Mansfield, shares his thoughts...

Microsoft outperformed expectations set even before the coronavirus pandemic and beat estimates on the top and bottom lines. Microsoft’s strong quarter was driven by the Commercial Cloud Business, which is largely driven by Azure and Office 365. Though both showed strong growth in Q3, it is important to note that growth for both is slowing down. In the earnings call, Executive VP and CFO, Amy Hood...

Most organizations have shied away from reducing costs of their SAP platform during lean times, but that’s no longer the case considering the breadth and depth of the economic impact of Covid-19. Chip Hanna, UpperEdge’s SAP Practice Director discusses some opportunities around AMS and hosting that companies have to drive down costs. There are a few levers companies can use—commercial levers on exi...

ServiceNow beat guidance and consensus in Q1 FY20 with subscription revenue growing 34%, reaching $995M. ServiceNow’s success is largely tied to the significant growth in the number customers that have expanded their portfolios and are now paying over $1M per year. There has been increased adoption of key products including but not limited to ITSM Pro, HR Service Delivery, and CSM. In this podcast...

The coronavirus pandemic has forced companies to seek financial relief in any way they can. Given the sizable spend tied to IT, many organizations start their cost reduction initiatives with a focus on cloud vendor spend. This is an opportunity for cloud vendors to lean into the relationship and provide win-win support. In this podcast, Adam Mansfield shares the most frequent requests he hears ent...

With all the changes in the market, Oracle is poised to dominate, so long as they are willing to adapt, evolve and potentially trailblaze. Jeff Lazarto, UpperEdge’s Oracle’s Practice Leader, discusses a few of these steps Oracle can take, starting with consolidation of their cloud appications as one business. Bringing in a single, true applications leader, could inturn bring in the additional tale...

As the coronavirus pandemic wreaks havoc on the economy, companies are understandably scrambling to reduce costs where they can. But prematurely engaging IT vendors without a well-thought-out plan can cause irreparable harm to your relationships - with both your internal stakeholders and your vendor partners. In this podcast, Practice Leader, Len Riley, shares the lessons he learned when he led co...

Javier Soltero, the General Manager and VP of G Suite at Google, recently reported that Google now has 6 million paying business customers. In February of 2019, Google had 5 million paying users and 4 million the year before. Announcements like this further demonstrate the success Google is having in penetrating businesses and gaining adoption. Microsoft is also well aware of Google’s success and...

On March 30th, Oracle announced that they are offering free online training and certification courses for Oracle cloud infrastructure and Oracle Autonomous database. Oracle doesn't often offer free resources of this nature but this comes in the midst of shelter-in-place orders and lockdowns around the globe. Oracle customers can take advantage of Oracle's free training now through May 15th. To lea...

Microsoft made a few announcements earlier this week that were all centered around their all-in cloud bundle, Microsoft 365. They announced two Microsoft 365 plans for consumers (Microsoft 365 Personal and Microsoft 365 Family) as well as a consumer edition of Teams which will be coming later in the year. Lastly, Microsoft rebranded the Office 365 solutions for small to medium-sized business as “M...

How is the Coronavirus impacting the SaaS market? This can be an opportunity for SaaS providers to step up, be leaders and demonstrate the true partnerships they have with their clients and employees. Workday has taken the initial step of paying a cash bonus to their employees, equalling two weeks of pay or roughly $80M. This was a pretty bold move as they are relatively small in comparison to the...

Microsoft announced that they have renamed their firstline worker (deskless) worker products, Microsoft 365 F1 and Office 365 F1. As of April 1, 2020, they will be known as Microsoft 365 F3 and Office 365 F3. Microsoft also announced that there is going to be new “lighter” Microsoft 365 F1 available to the market and Teams (which is included in these firstline products), will have additional funct...

Workday added 11 new Fortune 500 companies, about 45% of the Fortune 500 are now HCM customers, which comprises about 60% of the Fortune 50. Jeff Lazarto, UpperEdge’s practice leader breaks down Workday’s Q4 fiscal year 20 results, and talks about whether Workday’s HCM cloud solution could replace Oracle’s and SAP’s solutions. Host: Jeff Lazarto: https://bit.ly/37eCXdN Workday Commercial Advisory...

Claims that Oracle has misrepresented the nature of some of their cloud sales over the number of years has prompted lawsuits from shareholders. Some of these cloud deals weren’t all brought on by customer demand but instead by duress. In using their audit levers for on-premise licenses, Oracle would offer sweetheart deals to settle their audit claims so long as clients were willing to purchase clo...

In addition to Salesforce reporting its Q4 and full year FY20 earnings, they also announced that they are acquiring Vlocity for $1.3B and that their co-CEO, Keith Block is stepping down. This surprising leadership change could have major implications and raises many questions. Where will Keith Block go next? Will Salesforce alter the way they do business with Marc Benioff going back to the sole CE...

In its first earnings announcement since Sundar Pichai took over as CEO, Alphabet broke out both Google Cloud revenue (which includes GCP as well as G Suite revenue) and revenue from YouTube advertising for the first time. Though this is more transparency than we've seen in the past from them, they still refrained from disclosing the revenue tied specifically to GCP and G Suite. They also did not...

Ted Rogers, Practice Leader at UpperEdge, refers to a recent conversation he had with a Project Manager overseeing an application development project for his client. The conversation was a timely one coming on the heels of Ted's recent blog, 5 SOW Essentials to Make You Look Smart. From vendors to clients, it's extremely important to have a solid statement of work in order for all parties to agree...

Accenture recently announced that it is the first partner to achieve SAP-certified integration with SAP Model Company delivered through MyConcerto. Given their plan to deliver together in an integrated and single engagement, customers considering this model should take time to understand the partnership dynamics and how their integration will influence the relationship. In this podcast, Chip Hanna...

Microsoft had yet another strong quarter, with commercial cloud (which includes Azure, Office 365, Dynamics 365, and commercial aspects of Linkedin) clearly being a key component of Microsoft's successful quarter and the driving force for their future success. Can Microsoft achieve its overarching goal to be known as the only truly comprehensive solution on the market that can enable the sweeping...