What matters most is getting all they can out of every hour their business is operating. They are all focused on getting beyond the constraints that held their growth back in the past – everyone wants a growth accelerator today. For manufacturers especially, this includes applications with depth of functionality that can be quickly deployed regionally, and in more cases than ever, globally as well. Line-of-business leaders want applications that make an immediate impact on their entire value chain.
Just having a cloud strategy is not enough for any enterprise software company anymore. Owning the pain prospects and customers go through daily to get work done is all that matters. Every application and platform component needs to contribute to the goal of reducing customer’s challenges of doing business. In studying companies who excel at this, I’ve often used stock market indices to see how they compare to market averages and their competitors.
Charting Progress Using the Cloud Computing Stock Index
Creating and using stock indices to track the performance of specific industry and market sectors is a great way to cut through hype. I've been using these for over a decade to track industries and markets of interest, and have built the Cloud Computing Stock Index. You can download the latest summary here. If there are companies you think need to be included please let me know. I deliberately left out
The graph below shows all-time performance of the Cloud Computing Index relative to Microsoft, Salesforce.com. NetSuite and Workday.
Key Take Aways
- NetSuite posted a 62.6% increase in stock performance, followed by Workday (+20.57%), Salesforce (+4.23%) and the Cloud Computing Index (+4%) with Microsoft seeing a 8.18% decline in share price during the period.
- NetSuite, Salesforce and Workday continue to gain new customers in the mid-tier and enterprise areas of the market based on depth of functionality, rapid application development (RAD), and increasing success creating alliances with system integration, selling and technology partners.
- Workday’s expertise in Human Capital Management is accentuated by the depth of analytics and trend analysis and expertise in cloud-based integrations. Their depth of functional expertise in these areas is leading to rapid growth.
- NetSuite is succeeding with its two-tier ERP selling strategy against long-standing ERP vendors including Oracle, SAP and others.
Bottom line: Salesforce, NetSuite and Workday show how developing cloud-based applications designed for ease of use and speed of deployment are winning new customers in the enterprise – and driving up their stock price as a result.
Specifics on the Cloud Computing Stock Index
I used The Cloud Times 100 as the basis of the index, and included the 23 following companies, all of which are publically traded. These include:
- Akamai Technologies.
- Amazon.com, Inc.
- ARM Holdings plc
- CA, Inc.
- Cisco Systems, Inc.
- Citrix Systems, Inc.
- EMC Corporation
- F5 Networks, Inc.
- Fusion-IO, Inc.
- Intuit
- Juniper Networks, Inc.
- Keynote Systems, Inc.
- NetSuite Inc
- Qualys Inc
- Rackspace Hosting, Inc.
- Red Hat, Inc.
- Riverbed Technology...
- Salesforce.com, inc.
- Symantec Corporation
- Trend Micro Incorporated
- VMware, Inc.
- Websense Inc.
- Workday Inc
Note: I do not hold equity positions or work for any of the companies mentioned in this blog post or included in the Cloud Computing Stock Index.
