Written with Nicole France @lnfrance Customer 360 Mantra Manifests In The Customer Data Platform Over 12,000 customers from 40+ countries convened at Chicago’s McCormick Center for the annual Salesforce Connections conference.  Stephanie Buscemi, CMO, welcomed the audience and key customers such as Conagra, Indiana Pacers, and State Farm to the stage.  Key highlights from the […]

PSA, Subscription Billing Power Customer Centric ERP Almost 600 customers, partners, and influencers joined the FinancialForce team in Las Vegas. May 7th to 9th, to experience the latest in professional services automation (PSA) and customer-centric ERP.  CEO and President, Tod Nielsen, kicked off its user conference at the Aria Resort and Casino in Las Vegas.  […]

Organizations Move Beyond The Post-Digital Era I am consciously scaring you into existence.  The disruption ahead is not a fantasy.  When I founded Constellation Research and then wrote the best-selling book, Disrupting Digital Business, we stood at the dawn of a major shift in business models and disruptive technologies that powered what we coined digital transformation in 2008.  This powerful business force not […]

Growth Story On #CloudERP, Retail, And AI Shows PromiseAnd Key Milestones Photo: @rwang0 Epicor convened it’s annual user conference April 15-18 in Las Vegas.  The new management team showed a renewal in product and sales execution to over 3500 attendees.  Key announcements include: Release of EVA AI-Based virtual agent.  Powered by NLP, the new agent […]

Services Revenue Mix Could Reach 20% By 2020 Photo: @rwang0 On March 25, 2019, Apple held its special event on services at the Steve Jobs Theater in Cupertino, CA to launch and/or revamp 4 key services including: Apple News+. New service adds 300 magazines, the Wall Street Journal and more publications to 875 million iPhone […]

Oracle Customers Move To Cloud ERP For Innovation And Industry Capabilities Photo: @rwang0 Oracle hosted its Modern Business Experience (MBX) and Modern Customer Experience (MCX) events at The Mandalay Bay Convention Center on March 19 – 21st in Las Vegas, Nevada.  Over the past two years, customers have received significant delivery of nearly 900 features […]

IBM Gains Mojo On Cloud Vision and Shows Strength in Digital Ecosystems Dreaming of warmer pastures in Las Vegas and golf with colleagues, customers, partners, prospects, and employees slogged through the February rain of San Francisco in Moscone Center for the second iteration of IBM Think.  Think 2019 had many highlights beyond the lukewarm “second […]

Globalization 4.0 Attempts To Address Populist Revolt Global leaders gathered in the icy cold confines of Davos Switzerland for the 2019 edition of the World Economic Forum (WEF).  This 49th annual gathering’s theme focuses on Globalization 4.0 in the fourth industrial revolution.  Though most have not encountered the third industrial revolution, let alone the fourth, […]

Apply the Account Categorization Framework to Succeed in Account-Based Strategies An account-based strategy model needs to focus on re-establishing relationships. With a very-well-defined list of business-to-business contacts, the go-to-market strategy requires a disciplined approach to re-engage with customers. Unfortunately, most field organizations are saddled with tech-laden complexity. Constellation Research suggests that clients put human relationships […]

Retail Innovation Continues To Improve As Budgets And Margin Grow Over 40,000 attendees gathered at Jacob Javitz convention center in New York City for the annual big show (see Figure 1.)  The show kicked off with a keynote from BJ’s Wholesale Club Chairman, President, and CEO Chris Baldwin.  Chris conveyed the impact of retail on […]

Awards Recognize Mostly The Pinnacle and A Tinge Of Nadir For Enterprise Tech In 2018, enterprise tech remained fast-paced, innovative, and action-packed.  The Constellation Research team attended over 250 enterprise tech events, handled 1000’s of inquiries and briefings, dealt with 1000’s of media inquiries, and reached 100’s of millions in the social sphere.  With that […]

Big Tech Still Remains Attractive, Especially With The Recent Valuation Downgrade

Markets are still cautious.  Global outlook looks very different than the US outlook.  Actual economy and Wall Street remain disconnected.  Meanwhile, markets are trying to figure out a rational explanation of which one is the leading vs lagging indicator.  

Algo’s have been reset so we’re operating on different rules and they will be reset again.  Why Big Tech?  They play in a winner takes all market.  Apple and Google provide 99% of all the consumer software in the US.  Facebook, Google, and Amazon drive almost 63% of all advertising dollars
Tech is still strong with 20 to 40% growth. Investors will find it hard to find other asset allocation classes this good and this dominant.  

With valuations down, we can see the shift back to big tech in Q1 2019, especially now with depressed valuations. Everyone’s waiting the Q4 holiday numbers before making the plunge. So FAANG plus MIcrosoft, Adobe, Salesforce, ServiceNow, and Tesla are still all hot and Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent drive the China market.

As for the race to 1T in valuation, We’ll see a resurgence in 2019 of one of the FAANG’s plus Microsoft vie for the title. So here’s the run down: