EC Enterprise

Of all enterprise departments, product and engineering spend by far the most on AI technology. Doing so effectively stands to generate huge value — developers can complete certain tasks up to 50% faster with generative AI, according to McKinsey. But that’s not as easy as just throwing money at AI and hoping for the best. Enterprises need to understand how much to budget into AI tools, how to weigh the benefits of AI versus new recruits, and how to ensure their training is on point. A recent…

When HPE announced its intention to acquire Juniper Networks for $14 billion in cold, hard cash earlier this month, it was a bit of a shock. Sure, HP had already bought Aruba in 2015 for around $3 billion. Grabbing another networking company would presumably just add another layer to that business. Of course, there are always complications incorporating one large organization into another, and HP doesn’t exactly have the best record for being a smooth operator where that’s concerned over the years. But surprisingly,…

Erik Wikander Contributor Erik Wikander is the CEO and co-founder of Zupyak, a content marketing platform designed for startups, simplifying the process of creating SEO-optimized marketing content through generative AI. Creating a startup without a fixed idea is like building a startup backward. But that’s precisely how our startup, Zupyak, unfolded — and it worked. Our journey began when my co-founder, Qi Cao, was exploring various startup ideas. The one…

In October, Box unveiled a new pricing approach for the company’s generative AI features. Instead of a flat rate, the company designed a unique consumption-based model. Each user gets 20 credits per month, good for any number of AI tasks that add up to 20 events, with each task charged a single credit. After that, people can dip into a company pool of 2,000 additional credits. If the customer surpasses that, it would be time to have a conversation with a salesperson about buying additional…

From Salesforce drama to the year of generative AI Apologies to the Grateful Dead, but what a long, strange year it’s been in 2023 enterprise tech news. It began with a ton of Salesforce drama and eventually got taken over by generative AI and ChatGPT, which seemed to come out of nowhere to completely dominate the news cycle this year. But even though AI clearly influenced much of the news, and even my own coverage, there was still a ton of other enterprise stories that made the…

Daniel Lereya Contributor Daniel Lereya is the chief product and technology officer at monday.com, where he is responsible for driving the company’s forward-looking product strategy, vision, and execution. Previously, he served as a software team leader at IBM and as a software engineer at SAP. All products have a life cycle, from development to introduction to growth and maturity. A fantastic product is not enough. To continue accelerating your company’s…

Cisco was the most active company It’s that time of year when we look back at the year’s biggest tech M&A deals. Typically by this time, the usual acquisitive suspects like Microsoft, Salesforce, Adobe, SAP Oracle and Cisco have taken at least a few big swings. But this year, only Cisco took a big bite, ultimately announcing 11 total deals. SAP made a couple smaller deals, but Microsoft, Salesforce, Adobe and Oracle mostly stayed on the sidelines this year. The $61 billion…

The company began the year with a ton of turmoil This year did not start off great for Salesforce, with an unusual level of turbulence and uncertainty surrounding the company. But as the year comes to a close, Salesforce finds itself in surprisingly good shape financially: Its stock is up over 96% year-to-date. Earlier this year, such an outcome would have seemed impossible to imagine. The bad news started rolling in even before the new year began, when co-CEO Bret Taylor, who many…

I think most people would agree that 2023 was a challenging time to be a startup. There were lots of layoffs as companies struggled to make the transition from growth to profitability. Meanwhile, sales cycles were longer and many startups struggled to grow at a decent pace. As we start to see the economic signals improve a bit with inflation letting up, the cost of money dropping, and most currency headwinds decreasing, you would think that 2024 might be shaping up to be a better year. Not necessarily. We are in a…

More posts by this contributor Recognizing Probabilities In Budgeting And Forecasting As interest rates have returned to historical norms, the world has returned its focus to cost of capital and free cash flow generation. Businesses are working hard to conform to traditional heuristics like Rule of 40 (i.e., the idea that the sum of revenue growth and profit margin should equal 40%+, a metric that Bessemer helped popularize). Executives of both private and public cloud companies…