Long post alert—⏳
Many SaaS companies got obliterated the past two weeks as earnings for some of the biggest, most notably
@Salesforce revealed some weakness in the sector and questions around the long-term viability of SaaS and enterprise software in a rapidly changing landscape powered by Gen AI.
Is the SaaS bubble bursting? 👇🏻
I’ll come back to that in a moment, but perhaps first, it is important to look at the current market and what has driven the overall market up while the broad are economy is largely flat. Want to challenge this notion in terms of the market, remove NVIDIA from the S&P YTD and you will take away ~34% of the ascent of the S&P.
But put that aside for even a moment and what you will see is the AI trade is almost all hardware. And moreover, all NVIDIA, with a few other surprise winners (DELL and Supermicro come to mind).
And this actually makes sense. Because we are in the front loading phase of the AI boom. Building out infrastructure and data centers to support accelerated compute. This is why GPUs have become such a scarce resource and why we are seeing the big cloud hyperscalers like Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, Oracle, Google, and soon Apple gobbling up GPUs and investing big to develop homegrown AI chips.
Effectively, we are building the next generation “App Store” supported by AI, and it won’t be possible if the infrastructure is missing. But, while this is happening, the dollars are flowing from other parts of IT to AI infrastructure and projects. Our intelligence is showing this in almost all of our readings—and you can see if in numbers for OEMS shifting from CPU to AI Servers AND system integrators shifting from other IT projects to almost exclusively AI projects.
But, I think the tide will turn and I do think SaaS companies will be VERY INTERESTING as part of the AI movement and this will happen sooner than some think. And this is what I think the market is getting wrong.
What people are getting wrong?
The TLDR of this long post is that companies like Oracle, SAP, Salesforce, and ServiceNow to name a few have giant moats and deeply entrenched customers. Well over 100k customers each that depend on these software companies to run their business and deliver the best and most capable features in a regular cadence. Switching is horribly difficult and expensive and generative AI will take years to get to the point where it can render a UX from a mere voice or text prompt.
Therefore, in the next 2-3 years, at the very least, the consumption layer of enterprise software, much like the consumption of AI infrastructure will be led by as a service offerings that enable companies to quickly adopt AI. At our
@TheSixFiveMedia Summit that starts this week, we will feature conversations with CEOs like Bill McDermott of
@ServiceNow and Mark Mader of
@Smartsheet and I will discuss with both of them “Where AI will be consumed.” And for most companies outside of the mega scale cloud companies and the largest industry centric companies it will be in the cloud and/or in a SaaS like consumable model.
Despite our unparalleled excitement for the AI infrastructure that NVIDIA is selling, it has a small number of really big customers. If I’m an investor I would like companies that have a 100k users that can consumer more with the ability to raise prices by adding valuable features.
The monetization of AI has been limited to a few software players and this has been part of the reason the prices were hit so hard (IMO). Salesforce and others haven’t proven beyond a doubt that subscribers will pay substantially more for their offerings because of Gen AI/AI and that is a gap that needs to be filled.
But, I think the revenue is durable, the customers are sticky, and AI consumption will be done in software at scale really quickly. The big SaaS players have market and resource advantages and I don’t see them failing to pivot.  
$NOW $CRM $SAP $ORCL $IBM $SMAR $NVDA $SNOW