Technology
DataDog Delivers Clarity
DataDog (DDOG) priced their IPO last night above the increased range at $27. Shares will begin trading today. Despite some broad selling in “high growth software stocks” today we expect the shares to do very well. Perhaps too well for investors to make any money after the open. DataDog is in the “next generation monitoring”…
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Cloudflare comes for Cisco, Amazon, Google, Microsoft
At first we though of Cloudflare (NET) as an internet performance-management platform. But the company is more focused on security than pure performance. If you didn’t read our note on Fastly (FSLY) you probably should do that: Fastly Joins the New Enterprise SaaS Group. Their value proposition is that they provide greater security, performance and…
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Dynatrace – The new kid in application performance management
Dynatrace (NYSE: DT) is coming public this week. They are in the application performance (APM) space which has been around forever but becomes ever more complex as technology advances and more pieces are added into the computing mix. The challenge scales in a non-linear fashion so every so often brand new tools are needed. In…
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Customer Centric Operations with Medallia
Medallia (MDLA) joins the red-hot “New Enterprise SaaS” group with their IPO this week. They sit at the high end of the “customer management” space which has companies like Qualtrics (acquired by SAP during their IPO for $8B). Increasing recognition of this space may also be good for lower-end players like SurveyMonkey (SVMK). The whole…
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Cambium Networks
Cambium (CMBM) is a small networking equipment provider who has carved out a niche in tier-2 wireless networks and government/industrial networking applications. As such they operate “above the fray” in the tier-1 space where deals are larger but heavily discounted and “lumpy” in terms of sales. That doesn’t mean Cambium doesn’t face competition – other…
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Parsing Slack
Slack (NYSE: WORK) is an important name in the enterprise SaaS space that plans a direct listing on June 20th. Investors have to consider the long-term positioning of this company in an increasingly crowded infrastructure market. At a high level, we’d say that Slack aims to be the ultimate “glue” between users and applications that…
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CrowdStrike Continues the Software Winning Streak
It’s been a hot market for “New Enterprise SaaS” companies and CrowdStrike (CRWD) has added fuel to the fire by pricing their IPO last night at $34 – that compares to the original $19-23 filing range! CrowdStrike has certainly positioned themselves aggressively as the “new enterprise cloud” for information security. By doing so they put…
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Fastly Joins the New Enterprise SaaS Group
The investor love affair with “developer friendly” enterprise SaaS is still in full bloom. The last entry into the market, Zoom ($ZM), had a stunning debut. Our next contestant is Fastly ($FSLY) which is scheduled to price on Thursday night. We’ve been covering software infrastructure for 30 years. During the past ten (or so) it’s…
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Uber Promulgates Platform Platitudes
Uber Technologies (NYSE: UBER) wants to be positioned as a “platform” company so we’ll grant them their wish and evaluate them from that perspective. As an aside they filed their prospectus as “a prepackaged software” company. The deal will certainly get done as investors are keen to own the clear market leader in this space…
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Zoom Video Technology
This Thursday Zoom Video (NYSE: $ZM) will debut into a red-hot market for enterprise SaaS companies. The most recent, PagerDuty (NYSE: $PD) filed at $19-21, priced at $24 and is now trading close to $40/share. That’s about 25x trailing sales of $118M. That one is hard to buy at these prices. And if Zoom wasn’t…
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