Louis Columbus| Forbes
Translating time into dollars matters far more to many CEOs I’ve spoken with versus what platform their applications are running on. What matters most is getting all they can out of every hour their business is operating. They are all focused on getting beyond the constraints that held their growth back in the past – everyone wants a growth accelerator today. For manufacturers especially, this includes applications with depth of functionality that can be quickly deployed regionally, and in more cases than ever,globally as well.
Line-of-business leaders want applications that make an immediate impact on their entire value chain. Just having a cloud strategy is not enough for any enterprise software company anymore. Owning the pain prospects and customers go through daily to get work done is all that matters. Every application and platform component needs to contribute to the goal of reducing customer’s challenges of doing business. In studying companies who excel at this, I’ve often used stock market indices to see how they compare to market averages and their competitors.
Charting Progress Using the Cloud Computing Stock Index
Creating and using stock indices to track the performance of specific industry and market sectors is a great way to cut through hype. I’ve been using these for over a decade to track industries and markets of interest, and have built the Cloud Computing Stock Index. You can download the latest summary here. If there are companies you think need to be included please let me know. I deliberately left out IBM IBM -1.14%, Google GOOG +0.01%, Microsoft MSFT +3.58%, Oracle ORCL +0.45% and SAP as a prerequisite is that a firm derive at least 50% or greater revenue from cloud-based applications and services.
The graph below shows all-time performance of the Cloud Computing Index relative to Microsoft, Salesforce.com. NetSuite and Workday.
