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，就不会有什么从事“软件即服务”(software-as-a-service，简称“SaaS”)的公司可买了。技术业的大佬们正转而大手笔收购“企业云”公司——风险资本家们制造出多少这样的公司，他们就买下多少。那些剩下的SaaS公司则奇货可居。想想仅剩的这几家吧：NetSuite（专做预算编制类软件）、Workday（人力资源）、SolarWinds（网络管理）、Splunk（数据分析）以及ExactTarget和Responsys（均做市场营销软件）。截至昨日，这些公司的市值总额高达200亿美元，但它们过去12个月的营收仅有11亿美元，营业损失8000万美元，自由现金流2.2亿美元。