sutton020

Yesterday I argued that SaaS founders and investors shouldn’t worry about short-term movements of SaaS stocks and said that there are a lot of reasons to be bullish about the Cloud. Here are some of them. 1) SaaS is quickly becoming the norm In the last years there’s been a dramatic shift in deployment preferences of software buyers. According to a survey by technology evaluation business Software Advice , 88% of buyers with a deployment preference preferred on-premise solutions in 2008. Just six years later, the results were completely upside-down: In 2014, 87% of all buyers with a deployment preference preferred Cloud solutions. 2) Billions of dollars of on-premise revenues are still up for grabs In spite of this tectonic shift of deployment preferences, IDC estimates that in 2015 the market share of on-premise deployments in the enterprise applications market is still almost 80%. That means that billions of dollars will move from on-premise to the Cloud in the next ten years. 3) ...

If one looks at the stock price development of public SaaS companies in the last few weeks, one could come to the conclusion that SaaS is over the hill. Salesforce.com: 17% down from its 52 week high. Veeva: 30% down from its 52 week high. Workday is 29% down, Box 47%, Hubspot 22%. Everyone got hit, as you can see in Tomasz Tunguz' post about the topic . There are several reasons why this conclusion (that SaaS is past its prime) is wrong. Firstly, it's not just SaaS stocks which took a dive. The NASDAQ and the Dow Jones are both down more than 13% from their 52 week highs, too. Secondly, as this chart of the BVP Cloud Computing Index shows , SaaS stocks have outperformed the market significantly in the last couple of years, and it's not surprising that when the market corrects, stocks that went up more strongly than others are going down more strongly as well. More importantly though, while public markets are good at valuing companies in the very long run, short term moveme...