Notable Quotes

SandHill.com Staff Writer

I think Larry Ellison is dead wrong when he says innovation is dead and people want to buy big (software) suites — that’s not what’s happening in the world. I love our competitive position. … We saw when we started the company that SaaS was going to change everything because it was going to let us be a company that could think about ‘how could we get to 100,000 customers’ rather than ‘how do we get to 1,000 customers.’

-          Phil Fernandez, co-founder and CEO, Marketo

[Steve Jobs’] sense of design,that everything had to fit a certain aesthetic, the fact that he, with as little engineering background as he had – it shows that design can lead you in a certain direction so that phenomenal products came out of it. He knew about brand in a very positive sense. He had an intuitive sense of marketing that was amazing.

-         Bill Gates

Our product portfolio is as strong as it has ever been and we won more than our fair share of deals. Clearly we have work to do in training new reps on managing the sales process and the importance of establishing a quarterly rhythm with their deals.

-          Safra Catz, president and CFO, Oracle

It would be hard to envision a more apt “poster child” for the rapidly-shifting realities of enterprise IT than SAP. There are few entities with a more entrenched position and reputation at the core of traditional, server-based, data center-oriented IT.

-          Bruce Guptill, SVP and Head of Research, Saugatuck Technology

We will deliver something that works. We are committed to doing a proper cloud.

-          Darren Roos, COO, Software AG

There is a whole breed of software companies developing based on an idea and they build cheaply and deploy on AWS (Amazon Web Services). These companies don’t need much capital, a sales force and distribution because they have taken all the cost out. It’s a brilliant model, but enterprise software will be more fragmented.

-          Jim Whitehurst, CEO, Red Hat