Scott Dorsey: evaluation

Transcript context

…So the tech theme that I’ve been referencing a bunch and this is another perfect lead-in is there’s been this sort of historically in the enterprise space, which we again we haven’t talked as much about on the show. There’s kind of been sort of four-ish giants like there’s Microsoft, there’s SAP, there’s Oracle and then there’s Salesforce which has emerged as sort of most recently as one of these giants. There’s this concept of like a count control and there’s lots of startups in this space but ultimately those four companies are by far the biggest and they have the count control with the CIOs and increasingly CMOs and sales and CEOs where they can push all sorts of products through their channel. And ExactTarget as we talked about being a business line acquisition was a perfect fit with Salesforce as one of their first foray into a new product sending through their Gorilla channel or Gorilla-sized channel. How do you react to that and/or one of the main theses I’d think of SaaS enterprise investors is that with SaaS, that’s changing. People can buy stuff freemium like individual employees and account control is being eroded. How do you think about that being on both sides now? I definitely see both sides of it and you’re totally spot on, David. One of the big reasons why the ExactTarget acquisition has been successful is that Salesforce just has these amazing executive level relationships with the biggest companies around the world and they know Salesforce, they trust them. They want to buy more products that are tightly integrated and when you look at the Salesforce marketing cloud numbers, they’re booming and they’re really booming because they have all those trusted CEO and CIO relationships. Mark and the team, they’re just incredible innovators and amazing at executing scaling the business. So that’s real, there’s no question about that. However, there’s still plenty of opportunity for new innovation and new entrance and the innovators’ dilemma of companies coming up with new ideas and new concepts and software that’s lighter and more flexible and more mobile-friendly and more consumer-like. There’s no shortage of room, I think, for innovation and for new companies to find their groove. And that you don’t need your CIO to approve by it.…

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