Soon there may be no business software-as-a-service companies left to buy. The big boys of the technology industry are buying “enterprise cloud” groups up as fast as venture capitalists can crank them out. Those that remain are priced for scarcity. Consider this handful: NetSuite (budgeting), Workday (human resources), SolarWinds (network management), Splunk (data analysis), ExactTarget and Responsys (both marketing). As of yesterday they had a total market capitalisation of $20bn – on trailing revenues of $1.1bn, operating losses of $80m and free cash flow of $220m.
很快，就不會有什麼從事「軟體即服務」(software-as-a-service，簡稱「SaaS”)的公司可買了。技術業的大佬們正轉而大手筆收購「企業雲」公司——風險資本家們製造出多少這樣的公司，他們就買下多少。那些剩下的SaaS公司則奇貨可居。想想僅剩的這幾家吧：NetSuite（專做預算編制類軟體）、Workday（人力資源）、SolarWinds（網路管理）、Splunk（數據分析）以及ExactTarget和Responsys（均做市場行銷軟體）。截至昨日，這些公司的市值總額高達200億美元，但它們過去12個月的營收僅有11億美元，營業損失8000萬美元，自由現金流2.2億美元。