Clouded Judgement

OCTOBER 20, 2023

Hyperscaler Preview Next week Amazon, Microsoft and Google report earnings and we’ll see Q3 data for AWS, Azure and Google Cloud. These are thought to be the early AI winners, largely due to all of the compute they’re selling to power GenAI applications.

Cloud 161

Cloud Azure AWS Software Review 161

Clouded Judgement

APRIL 28, 2023

AWS (Amazon), Azure (Microsoft), and Google Cloud (Google) all reported this week. Then AWS appeared to add fuel to that hope before giving us a huge rug pull. After all, they had a lot of AI tailwinds, and benefited tremendously from consolidation (without a headwind of a larger base of smaller startups, like AWS).

Cloud 130

Cloud Azure AWS AI Search 130

Clouded Judgement

JUNE 9, 2023

Expansion revenue is still declining (we see this in falling net retention rates), but gross retention remains strong. Usage on Snowflake is driven by queries run on Snowflake Azure: Neutral Tone With Strength in AI Overall I’d characterize Azure’s quarter as a net positive.

Trends 130

Trends Cloud Azure AWS 130

Clouded Judgement

NOVEMBER 10, 2023

When I think about the monetization of AI (and which “layers” monetize first) I’ve always thought it would follow the below order, with each layer lagging the one that comes before it. Model providers (OpenAI, Anthropic, etc as companies start building out AI). 2024 will be the year of AI applications!

Cloud 183

Cloud Artificial Intelligence AI GCP(Google Cloud Platform) 183

Clouded Judgement

JULY 28, 2023

AI = Data + Compute I’ll continue beating this drum, but we got two great quotes from Azure and AWS this week. Satya at Microsoft said “Every AI app starts with data and having a comprehensive data and analytics platform is more important than ever.” AWS reports next week. So what did we learn?

Cloud 130

Cloud Azure AWS GCP(Google Cloud Platform) 130

Clouded Judgement

MARCH 31, 2023

How Will AI Effect Software Business Models? Like many, I’ve been thinking about how AI and foundation models will effect the world of software. In particular - how AI will effect software business models. The majority of COGS (revenue less COGS = gross profit) fall in hosting costs (ie AWS), and some customer support.

Cloud 130

Cloud Sales Hiring AI Headcount 130

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 24, 2021

It can be tough to know the answer to that question, but the indicators should be focused more on the retention side over the acquisition side. . Your customer retention is the best quantifiable measure of product-market fit; however, retention is a lagging indicator. Roberge recommends starting with product-market fit.

Sales Hiring 201

Sales Hiring Scale Compensation Sales 201

Clouded Judgement

AUGUST 11, 2023

The good news is gross retention (ie churn) stayed constant. And everyone hoping for AI acceleration will need to wait. The hyperscalers (AWS, Azure, GCP) are seeing some uptick, but this is largely from selling compute (ie cloud GPUs). The weakness they called out was from larger cloud-native businesses.

Cloud 130

Cloud Trends Azure GCP(Google Cloud Platform) 130

ReSci

JANUARY 23, 2018

Author: Avi Sanadhya, ReSci Platform Engineering Team At Retention Science we deliver personalized marketing campaigns powered by machine learning to drive a deeper level of customer engagement. Our AI engine, Cortex, is responsible for billions of predictions daily and hundreds of millions of personalized emails each month.

AWS 40

AWS Metrics Machine Learning Artificial Intelligence 40

OpenView Labs

FEBRUARY 9, 2021

This is why we’re seeing more and more SaaS companies—Datadog, Twilio, AWS, Snowflake, and Stripe, to name a few—find success with product led growth paired with usage-based pricing. Though it was pioneered in the infrastructure layer (think: AWS and Azure), it’s becoming increasingly popular for API-based products and application software.

Scale 98

Scale Pricing Scaling AWS 98

SaaStr

OCTOBER 31, 2019

It was around that time about 12 years ago that Jeff Bezos launched AWS, and some of you may remember that, when he did this, Wall Street analysts were looking at him and saying, “Why would you take what’s already a very unprofitable business and drive it further into the red by investing in this AWS initiative?”

Cloud 101

Cloud Scale AWS Machine Learning 101

Clouded Judgement

FEBRUARY 3, 2023

We have companies like BuzzFeed and C3 making loose announcements about how they will incorporate generative AI into their business, sending their stocks up 50-100%+. In the short term, enjoy the ride as the chase continues 😊 Kind of related to all of this - we now have seen the Q4’s from AWS, Azure and Google Cloud.

Cloud 130

Cloud Azure AWS Generative AI 130

Intercom, Inc.

DECEMBER 31, 2019

The ultimate failure of Siri to dominate the AI personal assistant game might come to be seen as its biggest miss of the decade. The wave of SaaS companies that built themselves on the likes of AWS and Azure have reinforced the pre-eminence of cloud computing.

Payment Solutions 259

Payment Solutions Payment Methods Software SaaS Payments 259

ProfitWell

SEPTEMBER 10, 2020

Running your own server to handle your customer's valuable data requires a huge investment to match the same level of security and reliability that comes baked into services like Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure cloud. AI Integrations. Double down on retention. As such, many SaaS businesses are opting for the latter. Offer tiers.

SaaS Payments 66

SaaS Payments Trends Merchant Services Payments 66

SaaStr

DECEMBER 20, 2023

For example, Google and AWS are already ZoomInfo customers, but only certain sub-segments within those businesses – not the entire org. So, in 2024, there should be a more normalized customer base from a retention perspective as you transition past Q1 and those customers are transitioning with you. What technologies do they use?

New CTO 260

New CTO Scale Sales Hiring AWS 260

User Pilot

JANUARY 26, 2024

For SaaS businesses, PLG offers benefits like lower user acquisition costs , reduced burden on customer success and support teams, sustainable and scalable business growth, and higher customer satisfaction, retention, and lifetime value. For example, your AWS bill will most likely go up, but this is the case regardless of the growth model.

SaaS 103

SaaS Acquisition Onboarding Retention 103

Casey Accidental

DECEMBER 11, 2023

This year, topics ranged broadly from incorporating AI to deliver world-class consumer experiences to defining and measuring different forms of community-powered growth. Acquisition, retention, and monetization potential of your first product is another reason B2B tends to expand earlier. Their retention strategies were also different.

Payments 113

Payments Scale Payment Solutions Technical Review 113

User Pilot

APRIL 30, 2024

Appcues enhances user onboarding, adoption , and retention with targeted walkthroughs, in-app messaging, and feature adoption tools. Key examples are Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform, which provide scalable resources like virtual servers and storage. What are the benefits of the SaaS model?

SaaS Payments 104

SaaS Payments Payment Services Payment Methods Payment Solutions 104

ChurnZero

SEPTEMBER 30, 2021

For example, I think of AWS. Things like AI – we of course we have Gong out there – that’s now taking notes for CSMs. Customer Lifetime Value and Client Retention: What’s the Connection – Find out how to improve customer lifetime value as well as your customer retention rate. You can do the math.

Customer Success 52

Customer Success Scale Sales Hiring Revenue 52

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 13, 2020

We’ve all seen AWS and what they’ve done with their platform. What we’ve built is this core AI machine learning engine that takes literally millions and millions of unique sources so that we can deliver 95% accuracy to our clients. If you look at the IAS vendors, they passed $130 billion revenue milestone this year.

Sales Hiring 161

Sales Hiring Scale Payments Cloud 161

SaaStr

AUGUST 22, 2020

This will be a really strong indicator of retention and recruiting. Five people in the digital team were looking at blockchain projects and three people on that digital team were looking for long term AI transformation. Is AWS in the lead? Aaron Levie: Everybody had their digital team. Aaron Levie: Exactly.

Sales Recruiting 148

Sales Recruiting Cloud CTO Hire Scale 148

SaaStr

MARCH 1, 2024

Generative AI is a platform shift where models can take inputs such as text, image, audio, video, and code and generate new content into any of the modalities mentioned. The Pace of AI is Increasing Dramatically Something ground-shifting has been happening over the last five years — the pace of innovation.

Generative AI 251

Generative AI Outsourcing Services AI Software Review 251

SaaStr

MAY 21, 2019

78 times in the AWS … ADABAS was referenced in the Amazon press release and earnings announcement. Now, retention differs significantly actually for different customer segments. Kristina : Next I want to walk through a quick example to really drive home that retention is a major driver of valuation. Twice for retail.

Cloud 166

Cloud Scale Finance Retention 166