But it is expected to get worse. In showing skepticism, shares of major names including Netflix, Salesforce and Meta-as well as growing but still unprofitable providers like Twilio-have all dropped double-digit percentages. Meanwhile, money-scarce vendors like Asana are close to rock-bottom and faced key questions about their ability to survive in a recessionary environment. Even Google is slowing down hiring. And there’s already a sheep sacrifice: Dan Springer at DocuSign.
Part of it is correcting the market itself from hyper-inflated profits that have mass-priced companies like Snowflake to near-perfection. But many stocks could fall even lower in the coming months. Now, it’s just a matter of which companies will start the potentially slow stampede of muted sales insights-for some, a strategy that will guide the lower now to make future growth more meaningful-and launch the subsequent cascade of analyst downgrades.
“We can see some signs of macro weakness,” said RBC Capital Markets analyst Rishi Jaluria. “The bigger question has to do with guidance and what will happen in the last half of the year. Too many companies are at risk for downgrading changes.”
However, the upcoming revenue cycle should not be too apocalyptic. Most scale vendors have customers locked into multiyear contracts, complete with multiple SKUs of products, and not immediately susceptible to any wild spending swings. That may not be true for smaller providers, especially those with a business model focused on selling outside the central IT team, or companies that profit based on end-user consumption.
But by the end of the year, when businesses have made important decisions about spending priorities, things can get brutal. That’s especially true for software makers who sell expensive systems that may require multiyear deployments, such as SAP, Coupa and Workday. Even cloud infrastructure, the industry’s proverbial golden goose, could see a slowdown as companies seek to clamp down runaway spending.
Here are five things to keep in mind in this revenue cycle:
How much will weaken customer demand – and where?
Even before the red flags of the economy began to emerge more clearly this year, investors were skeptical about the growth prospects for IT spending. There was a general fear that organizations would have mixed several years of investments into two, booming tech stacks and leading companies to reduce spending in 2022 and beyond.
Earnings in the first quarter showed that the demand environment was relatively stable. But analysts and company executives don’t expect that to continue. While this may not indicate a problem with this earnings cycle, forecasts for the annual and next year may start to look more appalling, especially for those companies with a higher percentage of their business. in regions showing more urgent signs of economic turmoil, such as Europe.
Demand shouldn’t drop significantly, as many companies are in the midst of several years of digital overhaul initiatives. But it was enough to start removing vendors that were largely helped by the spike in pandemic spending. And this quarter should give shareholders a better idea of which companies are best positioned to weather the upcoming storm.
“The biggest assumption of investors is that things are going to be harder from here until the end of the year,” said Wells Fargo analyst Michael Turrin.
No longer a question of ‘if’: What is the impact of FX?
It has already started to raise its ugly head in the last quarter, but foreign exchange rates, or FX, are poised to cause confusion in earnings.
Most major technology vendors are based in the US, but a large portion of their operations are worldwide. So if the dollar strengthens against other currencies – like the yen or the euro, which are consistent with the dollar for the first time in 20 years – the “headwinds could really start to kick in,” said Macquarie senior analyst Fred Havemeyer.
“The revenue and the cash flows that you book and recognize overseas, they’re being hit,” he told the Protocol.
The issue was so clear that ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott said it would affect every technology vendor, a statement that sank his own company’s stock.
What’s next for consumption -based pricing?
When Snowflake said revenue would drop by $ 97 million this year as a result of improvements that made it cheaper for customers to use the product, the statement dropped like a hammer.
For one, it seems to come from nothing. Just a few months ago, CEO Frank Slootman dismissed any notion that Snowflake was facing a threatening sales shortfall. Others said it didn’t make sense: that an infrastructure upgrade was unlikely to provide a sudden shortage. Ultimately, it has investors asking a lot of questions about consumption -based pricing. And now, along with economic uncertainty, the model is a potential red flag.
Although not as widespread as the standard SaaS model, consumption-based pricing is now widely deployed throughout the industry. But all the glamorous set-up-the ability to pay only for what you use-is the biggest drawback right now. Ask previous Snowflake customers the size of their initial charges, and you’ll probably hear something along the lines of: “higher than we thought.”
During the boom, that didn’t matter much. However, as businesses look to reduce spending, expect that consumption limits for expensive software are an early approach that executives are looking at.
That could spell trouble for Snowflake and others, which work perfectly on a consumption -based pricing model. MongoDB, for example, recently predicted lower usage of their flagship product database Atlas.
The narrative further questions the continued dominance of Microsoft, AWS and Google. While all three companies will continue to post relatively substantial growth, it may not be as blockbuster as the previous quarter.
The companies with the best position are those that “sell primarily to large businesses and operate subscription pricing models,” Morgan Stanley analysts wrote in a recent note. Meanwhile, “we’re becoming more cautious with companies operating usage -based models.”
Product-dominated growth is still an attractive strategy?
“Product -led growth” has been among the biggest buzzwords of enterprise software over the past few years. And the popular companion sales model, one where a line of business users can buy a product on their own with the click of a button, is being deployed by the likes of Smartsheet and PagerDuty .
But such a decentralized purchasing system may be less attractive in difficult economic times. Companies may want to center more purchases within IT to help maintain a cap on tech costs, which could force companies like Smartsheet to try to grow their businesses faster than they planned.
And small businesses, which have a large share of sales to companies like Atlassian, could be particularly hit by the slowdown and be forced to cut costs significantly.
How will ISVs impact against platforms?
Historically, vendors that offer a range of tools, such as Salesforce, Oracle, ServiceNow and others, have probably been better than providers that sell independent software vendors, or ISVs.
Risk appetite is declining and the need to have a new, sleek feature offered by an ISV – but soon to be featured in the latest Microsoft Teams product update – has subsided. The so-called “best in race” providers remain confident that customers will be hesitant to integrate too much into one of the major platforms. But analysts are already expressing concerns about small but growing companies like Asana, which are quickly running out of money and have a small competitive moat around them to prevent larger players from catching customers.
However, other vendors selling products that introduce product features that are more attractive in difficult economic times, such as automation, may show resilience. However, even RPA provider UiPath has laid off 5% of its workforce, indicating that the impact of the slowdown will be felt widely in the technology sector.
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