I’ve been doing lots of reading today. So, I decided to share some of them related to business strategies, sales, competition and cloud adoption. The first one from Peter Thiel’s lecture about business strategies and first movers. Navigate here to listen. Here is my favorite passage:
So even if the market starts small, you can grow your business quickly enough to stay at the same size as the growing market and maintain the monopoly of power. Now the critical thing about these monopolies is it’s not enough to have a monopoly for just a moment. The critical thing is have one that lasts over time and so in Silicon Valley there is always this sort of idea that you want to be the first mover and I always think in some ways the better framing is you want to be the last mover. You want to be one of the last companies in that category, those are the ones that are really valid. Microsoft was the last operating system, at least for many decades. Google was the last search engine. Facebook will be valuable if it turns out to be the last of social networking site.
Another one was about selling to new vs existing customers. Navigate to the following article to read more – 87 New (Really) Marketing Automation Stats. Here is the passage:
According to Bain & Company, a 5% increase in customer retention can generate a 75% increase in profitability. And it’s 6 times more costly to acquire a new customer than to keep an existing one. (Forrester Research, Competitive Strategy in the Age of the Customer, Oct 2013)
And the last one was about competition between Microsoft and Google – Everyone is talking about how Microsoft Office 365 is suddenly beating Google Apps. It speaks about adoption of Microsoft Office 365 product – a cloud version of desktop Microsoft Office. Here is a shocking numbers:
“Over the last six to nine months, Office 365 usage has skyrocketed,” he told us. “We see it on our network. We see usage of applications.” Up until last October, Google Apps was more popular, he said, and Salesforce and Box were the most popular apps used at work. That’s all changed. “Office 365 hasn’t quite taken over Salesforce.com yet, but it probably will in the next few months,” he says.
This is happening because Microsoft “is going around to every organization in the world and saying, ‘hey, you know your email, you’re on-premise Exchange server? You need to move that to the cloud. And here’s financial incentives to do that.”
All together, it made me think about cloud PLM adoption. Last week I put some of my thoughts about changing landscape of public cloud PLM usage. It is interesting to watch dynamics of cloud PLM adoption. There are companies that clearly can see themselves as a pioneers in PLM cloud. However, large PLM vendors are coming with new cloud strategies and selling them to existing customers. You can see some parallels between Google Apps and Microsoft Office 365.
Here is a news I just captured about new Dassault System 3DEXPERIENCE release 2015x. Navigate to Develop3D to read –Dassault Systèmes 3DExperience platform gets immediate update via the Cloud. Here is a very interesting passage:
Billed as ‘the largest cloud portfolio in the market’, businesses already employing the platform on public or private clouds were automatically updated to release new benefits, with more than 250 new capabilities within the transportation and mobility industry sector alone.“Every single cloud customer is already taking advantage of the volume of new enhancements we’ve implemented in R2015x, demonstrating the power of the cloud model,” said Dominique Florack, senior executive VP, R&D, Dassault Systèmes. “We are the first to truly take advantage of this model, in its simplicity, for our customers of all types and sizes.”
What is my conclusion? Cloud PLM is coming in a very interesting phase of competition – the competition for PLM mind. In many situations, it is about how to sell PLM to existing customers. These customers might have few PLM implementations already done. They are looking how to improve processes, replace some old tech and leverage cloud with low upfront cost of PLM. These customers might consider some coexisting strategies with old tools. Who will sell them new PLM solutions. If I rephrase Peter Thiel, who will become the “last cloud PLM vendor” in the market. Just my thoughts…
Best, Oleg
