Salesforce.com disrupted enterprise software and then invited others to do the same. Sometime in the early 2000s, the company exposed its internal development platform – the infrastructure, databases, and APIs used to support salesforce.com – as a service, force.com, that third parties could leverage to build their own apps for faster and cheaper than they […]
Dropbox and Box both originated as file sharing and sync (FSS) vendors in the mid-2000s but have since traveled along different trajectories. Box began migrating upmarket in 2008, complementing its core document storage solution with add-ons demanded by compliance-sensitive large enterprises….things like:Box Shield, which prevents a user from downloading a file infected with malware, automatically […]
I left Part 1 noting that even as FleetCor insists on its relevance in a world of electric vehicles, it has diversified away from fuel cards, investing first in adjacent verticals like Tolls and now in more far off areas like account payables. Through its $1.2bn acquisition of STP in 2016, FleetCor has come to process 90% of […]
With Visa and Mastercard, the feedback mechanism between issuers, merchants, and consumers is well understood. As I wrote in a previous post:If you wanted to build your own payments network to compete with Visa, you’d need to win over the issuing banks. Of course, you won’t get the issuers if you don’t have merchants to […]
On the surface, the combination of S&P Global and IHS Markit appears both inevitable, given the frenzied consolidation of financial market infrastructure in recent years; and straightforward, given that both companies are built on data. Smash the companies together, cut duplicative costs, cross-sell datasets, and combine the datasets into new products. Easy. But the deal’s […]
One possible explanation for why Twitter has been slow at developing new products is that for many years this was a muscle it didn’t have to exercise. Twitter got so big so fast, receiving national attention in SXSW less than a year after it was separated from a failing podcasting directory in 2006, that its […]
There are some obvious benefits to combining data from different sources: a spike in call center volumes can be traced back to a database error that prevents purchase orders from going through; a purchase order from one brand can be correlated against another to promote cross-selling; a marketing department can combine first party data from […]
A relational database organizes data into tables of rows and columns and links those tables through shared identifiers (keys). This architecture gained traction in the 80s and 90s, when applications were monoliths supported by single servers, and the data structure backing them – the tables, fields, and data type of each field (integer, string) – […]