Quite a few companies announced their quarterly earnings this week, and it’s evident that they are seeing the effect of COVID-19. Be it Amazon which saw a slower growth for its cloud vertical AWS or Atlassian which gave weaker guidance. All that and more in our weekly roundup of all things SaaS.
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News
SAP plans to spin out Qualtrics, its $8billion acquisition from 2018, for an IPO
Less than two years after SAP shelled out $8billion for Customer experience platform Qualtrics, the company has announced its plans to hive it off as an IPO. SAP will continue to be the largest shareholder, while Qualtrics CEO Ryan Smith will remain its largest individual shareholder.
Google’s Q2 cloud revenue increased by 43\%
While the parent company Alphabet struggled with declining ad revenues, Google Cloud reported revenues of $3.007billion, which is 43 percent higher than $2.77billion in the last quarter.
Amazon cloud revenue growth slows to 29\% in Q2
Amazon Web Services saw its growth slowed down for the first time since the first quarter of 2015. Amazon’s cloud-centric vertical reported revenues of $10.81billion which was less than $11.02billion that analysts had estimated.
Atlassian shares plunge on weaker guidance
The company behind Jira and Trello also announced its quarterly earnings with a revenue of $430.5million, which was up 29 percent y-o-y. However, the company has given a lower-than-expected revenue guidance of $430million to $445million, which led to its share price being dropped.
Along with the earnings, it also announced the acquisition of asset management company Mindville. The Swedish company will help Atlassian solidify its ITSM portfolio.
Cloudflare launches Workers Unbound, the next evolution of its serverless platform
Cloudflare has announced the private launch beta of its serverless platform to take on the likes of AWS Lambda. Dubbed Workers Unbound, the company claims that it’s is significant affordable than the competition. Along with highlighting speed benefits, co-founder and CEO also touts its ability to scale as well as regulatory compliance.
New Relic is changing its pricing model to encourage broader monitoring
Popular Application performance monitory software New Relic is changing how it charges its customers. Instead of charging basis the instances, it’ll be charging per user along with a smaller data component.
SaaS companies that got funded this week
Steadview Capital picks up $85-mn stake in Freshworks
London-based Steadview Capital announced that it had invested $85million via a secondary transaction in Freshworks in January this year. The Chennai and San Mateo-based Freshworks is among the SaaS unicorns from India and is now being valued at $3.5billion.
Qualgro leads $8 million Series A round in SaaS firm Hevo
Hevo, a data integration tool, has picked up $8million Series A funding. Led by Singapore-based Qualgro, the startup will be using the money to expand to more markets, and build up its team across tech, sales, and marketing.
SaaS startup Swoop raises $3.2M to modernize mom-and-pop transportation companies
Los Angeles-based transportation booking startup Swoop wants to bring chauffeured group transportation into the digital era by offering a SaaS platform. To enable the same, it has landed $3.2million seed funding which was led by Signia Venture Partners and South Park Commons.
YC alum Paragon snags $2.5M seed for low-code app integration platform
Low-code is garnering a lot of buzz, and it seems a lot of startups are aiming to ride the wave. Paragon, a company in Y Combinator’s Winter 2020 cohort has raised $2.5million Series A funding for its low-code application integration platform.
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Go-to-Market motions: how ZoomInfo responds to every lead within 90 seconds
Listen to
Eric Yuan, CEO and founder of Zoom Video Communications
Zoom is clearly the breakout hit amidst the current crisis. So it’s certainly interesting to hear the thoughts of the man of the moment so to speak, Eric S Yuan, its CEO and founder. He shares why he started Zoom, how they kept their pricing strategy extremely simple vis-a-vis the competition, why business principles are important and how they’re still able to keep the rivals at bay.
SaaStock: Global Events for SaaS Founders, Executives & Investors – with Alex Theuma
In this episode, Omer Khan talks to SaaStock’s founder, Alex Theuma about how he started the SaaS events business, how content played a key strategy in their growth and more. They also talk about how the ongoing pandemic made them transition to virtual events, and what the future of events could look like.
Marc McDougall of Clarity First Consulting
Clarity First Consulting, as the name suggests, helps companies book more demos from their potential users. Its founder Mc McDougall shares the things that should be kept in mind to have a website that’s optimized for conversions, what are the other tips for CRO (conversion rate optimization) and some tips on crafting perfect cold emails too.
Watch
SaaStr Summit Enterprise
SaaStr recently held its The Real Future of Work virtual conference. As we’ve said many times before, SaaStr’s events top the list of best SaaS conferences and events to attend, and this one’s no different. Watch videos from people behind successful SaaS companies such as DOMO, Front, Gainsight, PagerDuty, and more.
