Tag: Salesforce

The Layoff Scene in Philly & beyond

Tom Paine

Like many analysts and tech workers, I find the job market for enterprise software workers to be difficult to read right now.

I’ll start with Oracle, which The Information reported as having laid off “several hundred people”, mostly from Advertising and Customer Experience services, while concentrating more on healthcare after completing its Cerner acquisition. Oracle’s cutbacks seem more a result of a long-planned restructuring than a reaction to current economic conditions, but I’m sure the economy is an added factor.

At other major enterprise software companies (Salesforce, SAP, ServiceNow, Workday, Adobe ) there is little evidence of current layoffs. Salesforce, however, did lay off many in Hong Kong as part of a strategy to outsource China operations to Alibaba Cloud.

If you want to look for weakness at Salesforce, a good place to look at is its ecosystem, composed of companies that receive a high percentage of revenue selling to Salesforce customers.

Chicago-based Copado, which creates Devops tools primarily for Salesforce customers, recently laid “more than 100” of its 700 employees. Not clear why; Copado had recently expanded its efforts to the SAP community. Automox, a Boulder-based cloud operations vendor also heavily into the Salesforce space, laid off 18% of its employees (around 75 people) in mid-June, citing economic conditions.

Other than Gopuff’s last large reduction in July, I haven’t seen any other large tech layoffs in the Philly market. That doesn’t mean they aren’t in the process of happening; there can be a lag between the time layoffs happen and the time that news about them seeps out. But sometimes when an emerging startup cuts two or three engineers, it can be a big deal to that company though you may not hear about it.

In a different category, eCommerce, Shopify conceded that it had bet too much on continuing pandemic-fueled growth and was planning to cut up to 10%, or 1,000 employees.

Two of my best sources on the Philly Tech job market are very positive:

Mark Constan

1w

For those who have been #laidoff The July #Jobs Report was released and the US added 528,000 jobs. Unemployment even dipped to 3.5%, which is the lowest it’s been in 50 years. Hold you head up! Enjoy this weekend. Enjoy the time off you have this summer! You will have something soon.

https://www.linkedin.com/embed/feed/update/urn:li:share:6961325982012030977

1w

Trying to be positive.
Many layoffs are happening, and employees and candidates need to do some homwework in financials and product.


T. Brad Kielinski• 1stFounder & CEO at IT Pros1mo • 1 month ago

If there were ever a time to be laid off, now is the time.

Tech unemployment is 2.1%

The hiring market is booming for skilled and accomplished professionals.

There are 348,000+ “Software Engineer” jobs advertised on this platform alone.

Although the rise in salaries have calmed down, the only real challenge becomes which offer do you take?

Good luck out there.

https://ww.linkedin.com/embed/feed/update/urn:li:share:6961325982012030977

Remember, though, that recruiters have a natural bias towards keeping candidates positive and active.

Let me know of any layoff news at [email protected]

Update 8/27:FreshDirect shut down its Philly operations after 12 years. eliminating 40 jobs in the process.

Update 8/31: Things are fairly quiet, though its difficult to ascertain whats going on behind the scenes. Wondering if Comcast will be cutting workforce, given slowing growth.

Update 9/1: Two WARN Notices:

Conduit Global Inc.
3400 Bath Pike
Bethlehem, PA 18017

175 people affected

DHL Supply Chain
120 Commerce Lane
Tatamy, PA 18085

58 Affected

EPAM Announces Agreement to Acquire Salesforce-boutique PolSource

Newtown-based EPAM announced today an agreement to acquire Salesforce consultancy Polsource.

Polsource is described by EPAM as a “Salesforce boutique” with over 300 employees (according to LinkedIn) spread out over Poland, the UK and the US.

EPAM’s objective is “to scale EPAM’s growing Salesforce capabilities and expansion into new markets.” 

According to Crunchbase, PolSource had a Series A in 2019 led by Salesforce Ventures.

EPAM Announces Agreement to Acquire PolSource

EPAM logo (PRNewsfoto/EPAM Systems, Inc.)

NEWS PROVIDED BYEPAM Systems, Inc. 

Mar 01, 2021, 10:02 ET

NEWTOWN, Pa., March 1, 2021 /PRNewswire/ — EPAM Systems, Inc. (NYSE: EPAM), a leading global provider of digital platform engineering and development services, today announced its agreement to acquire PolSource—a Salesforce Platinum Partner with more than 350 experienced Salesforce specialists—to scale EPAM’s growing Salesforce capabilities and expansion into new markets. The proposed acquisition is expected to close at the beginning of EPAM’s fiscal second quarter, subject to required regulatory approvals and other customary closing conditions, at which time PolSource’s senior leadership team and hundreds of Salesforce experts will join forces with EPAM Systems. 

PolSource is known as a global boutique Salesforce partner, specializing in consultancy services and delivering powerful digital transformation solutions. As a Salesforce Platinum Partner, PolSource brings a reputation for industry innovation—delivering successful multi-cloud end-to-end solutions across many key industries, including consumer goods, retail, manufacturing, automotive, technology, healthcare, and life sciences. The five-star rated company has more than 1,000 Salesforce certifications (including Salesforce Certified Technical Architects), has earned 14 AppExchange Navigator Specialist & Expert Awards, and is an active member of six Salesforce partner advisory boards.

PolSource’s expertise spans the Salesforce Customer 360 platform (including Sales, Service, Marketing and Commerce), and key Salesforce practices across Heroku, AI, Data & Analytics, Integration (including MuleSoft), Mobile, and CX/UI. With consulting and delivery teams across the Americas and EMEA, PolSource is trusted to design, deploy, and support solutions for many of the world’s global brands.

To learn more about EPAM’s growing Salesforce Practice, click here

About EPAM Systems
Since 1993, EPAM Systems, Inc. (NYSE: EPAM) has leveraged its software engineering expertise to become a leading global product development, digital platform engineering, and top digital and product design agency. Through its ‘Engineering DNA’ and innovative strategy, consulting, and design capabilities, EPAM works in collaboration with its customers to deliver next-gen solutions that turn complex business challenges into real business outcomes. EPAM’s global teams serve customers in more than 35 countries across North America, Europe, Asia and Australia. As a recognized market leader in multiple categories among top global independent research agencies, EPAM was one of only four technology companies to appear on Forbes 25 Fastest Growing Public Tech Companies list every year of publication since 2013 and ranked as the top IT services company on Fortune’s 100 Fastest-Growing Companies list in 2019 and 2020. Learn more at www.epam.com and follow us on Twitter @EPAMSYSTEMS and LinkedIn.

About PolSource
PolSource is a Salesforce Platinum Partner with hundreds of experienced, certified Salesforce experts. We provide proven results with consulting, delivery, and success teams throughout the Americas & Europe. Our industry-specific accelerators deliver rapid transformation, and measurable outcomes across Retail and Consumer Goods, Manufacturing, Automotive, and Technology companies, to name a few. Learn more at www.polsource.com and follow us on Twitter @polsource and LinkedIn.

Forward-Looking Statements
This press release includes statements which may constitute forward-looking statements made pursuant to the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, the accuracy of which are necessarily subject to risks, uncertainties, and assumptions as to future events that may not prove to be accurate. Factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied include general economic conditions and the factors discussed in our most recent Annual Report on Form 10-K and other filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. EPAM undertakes no obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events, or otherwise, except as may be required under applicable securities law.

SOURCE EPAM Systems, Inc.

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Philly EnterpriseTech Highlights 11/25: What year is it? Comcast price increases, Amazon outage, Salesforce on verge of a big acquisition

Cloud Earnings Highlights: Salesforce (CRM), Workday (WDAY), Veeva Systems (VEEV)

Tom Paine

Salesforce slightly beat expectations for Q1 of its 2021 fiscal year, reporting net income of 70 cents per share on revenue of $4.87 billion, up 30% from the prior year. The company dropped its revenue forecast for the full year by $1 billion to $20 billion.

Salesforce expects earnings between $2.93 and $2.95 per share, down from previous expectations 0f $3.10 per share.

Salesforce’s deal with AT&T (Wireless) is one of the ‘largest transactions we’ve ever done,’ says Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff.

Workday showed profits of 44 cents per share (excluding certain items) on revenue of $1.02 billion, up 23% from a year ago. It also lowered its forecast for the year.

Workday will offer a new integration with Salesforce’s Work.com to help joint customers plan for the safe reopening of their workplaces in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.

I find it intruiging to see the two companies working together, and wonder if that collaboration might lead to bigger thing in the future.

Pleasanton, CA-based Veeva Systems, Inc., with east coast offices in Radnor, had a tremendous start to its fiscal year 2021. Revenue was up 38% from the prior year to $337.1M, while net income was $86.6 million, up 18%. Veeva benefited from customer activity created by Covid-19, the general pace of change in the industry, and the continued fleshing out of its product line.

Matt Wallach, who retired from his role as president of Veeva Systems as of June 2019, returned as a non-managerial board member in January as planned. Wallach is also involved in the startup community, such as serving on the board of HealthVerity.

The Salesforce Ecosystem is exploding

Tom Paine

Although shaken like everyone else by Covid-19, the universe of companies that have built around Salesforce, many within Salesforce’s portfolio of investments, seems to be booming, perhaps exceeding the growth of the mothership itself.

A few recent cases out of many:

New Jersey-based Cognizant Technology Solutions shares rose yesterday after the company announced that it would acquire digital marketing agency Lev Digital, based in Indianapolis. On its home page, Lev says “Lev is the most influential marketing-focused Salesforce consultancy in the world”. I don’t know how they back that up.

Lev will be Cognizant’s third recent acquisition related to its effort to expand its Salesforce business. Last month, Cognizant acquired two other Salesforce premium partners. Cognizant had previously purchased another Salesforce consulting firm in 2018.

Although Cognizant is much larger, the strategy reminds me of LiquidHub’s strategy of buying and integrating Salesforce marketing shops prior to being acquired by Capgemini in 2018. An update from Capgemini Invent, the global group established around LiquidHub and other acquisitions, says it grew 15% in 2019 and passed the $1 billion revenue mark. The LiquidHub acquisition certainly contributed a big chunk of that.

In other deals, Accenture (NYSE: ACN) completed the acquisition of the Workday, Salesforce and U.S. MuleSoft practices from Alpharetta, GA-based Sierra-Cedar. The acquisition adds to Accenture approximately 275 professionals focused on the small and medium-sized education and government markets.

And of course, Bob Moore’s Philly startup CrossBeam, in which Salesforce is an investor, is built on a Salesforce platform.

An IDC study projects what the Salesforce ecosystem might look like in six years..

Its a good time to buy high-quality smaller firms which may not have much access to capital markets, although that may not be the reason behind these specific deals.


Philly EnterpriseTech Highlights 2/26 to 2/27: Salesforce; Passage Bio; Invite Media

New: Sidecar growing by adding new channels http://bit.ly/380rUDa

FROM ENGLEWOOD CLIFFS, FAST-GROWING OWNBACKUP SECURES CLIENT DATA WORLDWIDE

Sam Gutmann
Sam Gutmann, CEO of OwnBackup | Courtesy OwnBackup

FROM ENGLEWOOD CLIFFS, FAST-GROWING OWNBACKUP SECURES CLIENT DATA WORLDWIDE

Steve Sears

 September 25, 2019  Steve Sears0News, NJ Tech Companies, NJ Tech People, Tech for Business,

Numbers are important to OwnBackup. The company currently houses 80 employees at its headquarters, in Englewood Cliffs (possibly 200 by year’s end), and 150 worldwide.

“We have a large presence still in Tel Aviv, we have an office in London and we have 10 to 15 people scattered across the United States working remotely,” said Sam Gutmann, CEO.

In August, OwnBackup was ranked #102 on the Inc. 5000 list for 2019, and it came in at #2  when NJTechWeekly.com compiled a list of fast-growing NJ tech companies from the Inc.article,

However, as significant as these numbers are — and from Gutmann’s reaction, you know they’re extremely important — what OwnBackup is doing for its steadily increasing clientele is at the forefront of the CEO’s mind.

“We consider it backup 3.0”

Sam Gutmann, CEO of OwnBackup

“We consider it backup 3.0,” said Gutmann. “Cloud to cloud, moving data from one cloud to another. Right now, we focus on the Salesforce ecosystem, the fourth-largest enterprise software company in the world: 180,000 customers.”

How it works

He explained the process. “We generally back up customers that use Salesforce or other applications built on the Force.com platform. When a customer deploys our tool — frankly, it’s a 15-minute set-up process — we almost immediately start backing up all the data they have on the platform. Then what happens, in the event of a data loss, the first thing you need to do is understand what happened. Salesforce or anything built on the cloud now is a giant, relational database. So if you delete 100 accounts, for example, you’re just not affecting those 100 accounts; the contacts, the opportunities and the leads would also be affected. We call this ‘cascade delete.’ Our series of comparison tools allows you to compare any two points in time. And we understand what data records were added, changed or deleted. Once you understand the extent of that data loss, we have tools that will allow you to start recovering the data.”

Recovery time for OwnBackup global clients depends on extent of the data corrupted. “We really want to provide the [100% Software-as-a-Service solution] tools, so you, the client, can understand what exactly was affected in a surgical way, and put the database back together, precisely the way you think it should be,” said Gutmann.

OwnBackup, minus its current name, was started as a part-time project in 2013 in Israel by Gutmann’s friend and colleague, current CTO Ariel Berkman. In mid-2014, Berkman landed a large enterprise customer in the United States, which encouraged the company to think more globally and changed the part-time project into a full-time venture. The latter involved bringing in a management team, and that’s when Gutmann got involved.

Born and raised in Bergen County, Gutmann lived in Manhattan for 10 years, but he’s now back in the New Jersey suburbs. “Frankly, [I] almost always worked in Jersey, even when I lived in the city. I did the reverse-commute.” Though only a stone’s throw from the George Washington Bridge and the business mecca that is Manhattan (and the rest of New York City), office space in his locale is a third as expensive, he said.

“We attract great talent right where we are,”

Sam Gutmann, CEO of OwnBackup

Gutmann and OwnBackup have just moved into a bigger space in Englewood Cliffs, and Gutmann noted that commuting daily to a New Jersey office is easier than crossing the Hudson. “We attract great talent right where we are,” he said, adding that there are two shuttles that transport Gotham residents to the company offices.

The search for talent

OwnBackup is on the lookout for talented folks. “If you’re amazing, and you want to join an amazing fun, fast-growth tech company, we are very, very much hiring,” said Gutmann. He explained that there are currently 39 open positions to fill, including those for account executives, sales development representatives and marketing specialists. “[Bergen County] is a great place. We are one of the fastest-growing tech companies in Bergen County, or perhaps the fastest-growing, and we want to continue to grow here. We look forward to continuing our involvement in the community and to continuing to build a great company.”

Gutmann also stressed that office camaraderie is crucial. “We are very proud of the team we’ve built. Culture is extremely important to us. The two most important things that I do is help hire and attract amazing people and help foster a culture where everyone is working together towards our mission and our vision, but having fun while we do it.”

The absolute number-one challenge? “Hiring amazing people. We have hired slowly and methodically, and there’s a lot of great people out there, but sometimes they take a little time to find. Our growth is certainly dependent on our ability to ramp up the team, and we’ve done a great job at it, but we’ve got a long way to go.”

 Tags: Ariel Berkman, Englewood Cliffs, OwnBackup, Sam Gutmann, TelAvivPrevious:Panelists Talk About Markets, Runaway Valuations at Princeton Pitchstop EventNext:Marketsmith “Leans In” on Data Science and AI to Drive Marketing Outcomes

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About The Author

Steve Sears

This article originally appeared in NJTechWeekly, and is reposted here with the permission of that site.

COPYRIGHT © 2019 NJ TECH WEEKLY ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Looking at Salesforce vs SAP present & future

Update 2/9: Salesforce (CRM) briefly passed SAP (SAP SE) in total market value for the 1st time during the past week .

As of Friday close (2/7)

Market CAP:

CRM $164.7bn

SAP SE $165.2bn

Comparison Chart. https://yhoo.it/2H35VQO

file:///Users/thomasallenpaine/Desktop/EKCWcIgX0AACcUq.jpg

Tom Paine

I’ve been wondering for some time whether Salesforce’s (NYSE: CRM) growth would falter, but it really hasn’t yet in a big way. Though a string of acquisitions have had a dilutive effect, investors have rewarded it with a growth premium in terms of a higher Price to Earnings (PE) ratio. Its somewhat akin to what happened last year when Netflix briefly surpassed Comcast in market value. Such a PE advantage, though tenuous, gives Salesforce a strong currency for acquiring others.

Salesforce may be on the verge of becoming a more powerful enterprise player than the possibly capital-constrained SAP, under pressure from an activist investor, in spite of its considerably smaller revenue & profit base.

Comparative share prices: Salesforce (light blue) vs SAP (dark blue) Past 5 years

CRM Mkt cap$146.8B
SAP SE Mkt cap$162.4B

In 2018, SAP redesigned & retargeted its CRM, but its way too early to measure how effective that relaunch has been.

SAP CRX ( Qualtrics): The acquisition of Qualtrics opens up an adjacent market to CRM that Salesforce isn’t much of a player in today.

Salesforce could move more into SAP’s space:

Salesforce Options

  • Buying WorkDay would appear financially feasible, though WDAY founders control voting stock (they won’t allow another Peoplesoft). WDAY brings Financial ERP as well as HCM.
  • Continue partnerships or consolidate RootStock & Financial Force (manufacturing & financial ERP)
  • Buy Zoho if available. Threat to cannibalize Salesforce’s own core business, but could be like Microsoft’s Great Plains acquisition

Salesforce acquisition target list leaked in 2016 – What’s happened since

Adobe Mkt cap 134.91B, essentially the same as CRM

LinkedIn . Acquired by MSFT for $26.2 billion

Workday . Mkt Cap $39.9 billion

ServiceNow . Mkt Cap $50.8 billion

Netsuite . Acquired by Oracle for ~$9.3 billion

Tableau Acquired by Salesforce for $15.7 billion

Pegasystems . Mkt Cap $5.7 billion

Qlik Acquired by Thoma Bravo for $3 billion

Veeva . Mkt Cap $21.7 billion

Box . Mkt Cap $2.6 billion; Recent activist stake

Demandware . Acquired by Salesforce for $2.8 billion

Zendesk Mkt Cap $8.6 billion

Marketo Acquired by Adobe for $4.8 billion

Hubspot . Mkt Cap $6.8 billion

Salesforce’s Mulesoft acquisition last year was totally off the chart. SAP owns no equivalent.

Salesforce needs to decide whether to build a strategy around smaller customers, or double down on larger customers.

Salesforce is also likely looking at ways to accelerate its CRX ambitions.

Another possibility is a dead stop to Salesforce’s organic growth, but that seems unlikely given the size and projected growth of the market

Not discounting Oracle at all, but see it more as a hard engineering company, inconsistent in end user applications.