Akashvani: 2024 | May
Some tech reports, streaming habits, some advice, a book to avoid, and a kickass tool
Hope you are well.
I wanted to share a few things that I found that may be helpful – some tech metrics/trends, an overview of cybersecurity, CIO musings, tech jobs, teen streaming habits, some advice, a book to avoid, and a kickass tool. Let’s get into it:
· To start with, some tech metrics. First, sales/customer success (“SaaS_AE_Metrics”): Significantly fewer people are asking CSMs to do renewals (page 14), ditto for cross-sell and upsell (page 15), hybrid seems out of fashion – either local in an office or fully remote (page 20), experience matters again (page 22), tenure up (page 27), etc. All points to the fact that sales are important again! And one on M&A (“SEG 1Q24”) for my corp dev friends: Software spend is up from 10% in 2017 to 20% of total IT spend now (page 4), M&A deal volume up 16% QoQ, multiples haven’t changed (~5x, page 11), only ~10% of companies are growing more than 30% (page 26), DevOps/IT management with the highest growth as a category at ~24% (but most categories except ERP/supply chain are down, page 32).
· To take a sub-sector view, first to the juggernaut that is cybersecurity via a good overview (“Morgan Stanley - Cybersecurity 101”): It’s ~6% of the total IT market at ~$300B (page 5), growing ~3x SW/IT spend (page 6), endpoint security projected to grow fastest (page 13), pretty fragmented – top 5 vendors in each segment make up ~50% of vended market (page 15), ~50% of spend in security is on professional services (page 55). Worth a flip, especially for those trying to get a quick overview. 🔐 And one on ERP (“UBS ERP”): Only ~16% is pure SaaS – pretty low no? (Figure 2), about 1/3 have ERP as their top priority (Figure 6), NPS is pretty low for most vendors (~20%, with Workday showing the highest fall from 2019, Figure 9), NPS for HCM is marginally better at ~25% with the exception of Oracle (Figure 21), etc.
· Another month, another few CIO surveys. First, one focused on Asia (“Morgan Stanley - Asia - CIO Survey”). Lots to chew on: Growth continues to slow (page 5), ERP projects most immune to cuts (page 6), willingness by vendors to discount higher (page 8), the need to localize continues to be strong especially in cybersecurity, collaboration, and ERP (page 14), shifts to local vendors also in OS and DB (page 17), none of the US-based players in the list of security vendors (page 31). I’m sure those in the region will have a more nuanced view, but this may be useful for those in the West. Second, one that’s more (I’m assuming) global (“Barclays CIO Survey 2024”): OpenAI/Azure dominates (Figure 16), cloud providers have raised prices by ~7% with Oracle raising the most (of course!, Figure 19), repatriation of workloads from the cloud continues to increase (Figure 20), plus more. Worth a flip, even if it’s a bit dated. [Hat tip to Christopher for pointing this second one to me 🙏]
· On to the most important part of tech, people. The macro trend is of course the loss of tech jobs from California, but it’s useful to see actual data (“California Tech Jobs.pdf”): The percent of all tech jobs in the US that are in California has fallen from ~20% in 2020 to ~16% (page 3), the total (net) number of jobs added in CA vs. the rest of US since 2020 is 6k vs. 570k (page 2), yet employees in CA take home ~30% of total compensation (maybe more of the management is there vs. the workers increasingly in lower cost areas?, page 14), etc.
· Now to current enterprise SW leader profiles that I know about that are looking please see here. I’ve masked all of these; but if you want your profile to be public at least to the recipients of this newsletter, please let me know and I can add to the page. Or if you are at a company looking for people, ditto. Two 🆕new ones: One is a Chief Customer Officer, and one is an SVP of ops – both for mid-market SW companies in the infra space. [Reminder: I’m not a recruiter; just trying to help]
· A little broader now than tech, into streaming. Piper Sandler has a (US) teen survey on streaming habits (“Piper Sandler Teen Survey”): teens spend ~10% (2.5 hours) of their day streaming (page 6), girls spend more time on Netflix, boys on YouTube (page 12), 2/3 use Spotify (page 23), etc. Of course, if you have teenagers, you know without any report that they spend all their time on screens – not just 10%! 😟 Worth a quick look if you are into media.
· Ok, for a different type of tech – lead pencils, specifically the history of them (“History Of Lead Pencils”). A few tidbits – first, they don’t contain lead – it’s graphite, the graphite was wrapped in sheep’s wool first before someone figured out how to ensconce it in wood (in the late 1500s), and it’s never used in space since shards of graphite could cause harm. ✏️
· A bit of advice for professional services people, via an article from HBR (“What Today’s Rainmakers Do Differently”) on what rainmakers 🌧️ at professional services firms do differently. The bottom line is that "activators" (i.e. network builders) have a huge leg up on people that rely more on just their expertise. Bit obvious, but what surprised me was the % variance between the profiles (a performance difference of almost 50%). For those that know me, know that I'm a HUGE believer in this — lean forward, don't be transactional, always be helping, be human.
· In the spirit of giving advice, a public service announcement: If you have a desire to read Cal Newport’s new book – Slow Productivity, please don’t. I can summarize it for you here: -- do less, slow down, and focus on quality. The concepts are great, but the anecdotes and examples to support those claims seemed weak, strained & boring. One to skip. (For reference, I’m a big proponent of some of his stuff – e.g. Deep Work). 📖
· Now of course a tool, and one that I don’t think I can live without – VimCal. It’s my favorite calendar 📆 tool; killer features - you can create appointments with just natural language (“Dinner at 8:30 pm tonight with foo@bar.com”), quickly look at availability by just pasting in times that others have sent (yes, really!), and of course all its keyboard shortcuts (e.g. Z for time zones). Superhuman and VimCal should combine to be the ultimate Outlook killer. Worth every $. (For reference they only have like 15 employees!).
Hope this helps. All the referred to files can be found here (or attached).