I have been an active venture investor for 13+ years. I have never been more excited about the opportunities in enterprise IT. I will post more in the future about Openstack, the cloud, mobile and the changing landscape but Matt Asay of ReadWrite and 10Gen did a great job of summing it up in his article “It’s Official: Legacy Tech Vendors Are in Permanent Decline
With Oracle, IBM, Microsoft and SAP all repeatedly missing key earnings numbers, a clear and troubling trend has emerged.
SAP has missed key financial projections five times in the last 10 quarters. Oracle has whiffed four times in the last seven quarters. IBM has done better, but has tripped over earnings and revenue in the last two quarters. Microsoft? It has gone four straight quarters striking out on guidance for big areas of its business. Across the board these and other legacy vendors blame sales execution or macroeconomic factors.
Perhaps they should instead blame their technology.
The cloud is having a profound effect on everything IT. Trillions of dollars of market share are going to shift hands over the next decade.