Specialist
Former developer at Planisware SAS
Agenda
- Planisware’s revenue mix and competitive dynamics across its Enterprise and Orchestra products, highlighting the company’s acquisition of NQI
- Growth drivers and outlook across Planisware’s Enterprise and Orchestra product lines
- Assessing Enterprise v7 uptake and SaaS penetration rate for Planisware
- Industry vertical focus for Planisware and outlook, including expansion opportunities in wider deployment environments such as IT
Questions
1.
Planisware was generating about USD 130m revenue in 2021, and a chart online showed the company was generating about USD 10m in 2002, so it roughly grew at a CAGR of 14-15% during that time. Obviously, there were some fluctuations in performance within that. How should we contextualise this growth rate? Has this performance been as expected? When you think about the demand drivers for PPM [project portfolio management] or SPM [strategic portfolio management], how should we benchmark this growth?
2.
In 2002-21, Planisware had a CAGR of 14.5%, but pretty much 15%. Has the revenue growth performance been as expected, based on what you know of the market and company?
3.
You talked about the acceleration, and over 2018-21 Planisware’s CAGR reached 17.6%. Do you put most of that down to the company’s 2018 acquisition of NQI, or did you also see an organic growth acceleration for the core Enterprise product?
4.
What are your thoughts on any external factors? Did coronavirus impact Planisware’s growth? You talked about this kind of PPM and SPM tool becoming a commodity, which I assume means it’s becoming a must-have.
5.
What do you think might be happening in the demand environment, given the macro situation? Talking about the mission-criticality of a tool such as Planisware’s is really interesting. Do you think new businesses might be less likely to spend on a new PPM or SPM for the next 6-9-12 months, or could existing customers maintain spend and not spend any more with Planisware?
6.
Is it less likely that replacement cycles will happen right now or in the next six months, given where we are? Might that be different for Enterprise vs Orchestra? Could one see fewer replacement cycles coming to market as new business opportunities?
7.
Do you think businesses will be less likely to want to switch away from Excel to an SPM tool, given the macro conditions in Europe? Or might demand remain stable even in a macro downturn such as now?
8.
Enterprise is still the vast majority of Planisware’s revenue. The company acquired NQI in 2018, so it’s a bit difficult to assess Enterprise’s organic growth rate since then. Is your sense that it has been growing at the historical rate of about 15% YoY? What do you think has been driving that Enterprise growth rate? Is it primarily just the v7 transition and demand for SPM replacing Excel?
9.
You mentioned the compliance around the agile side. Is that still an advantage for Planisware, or have competitors caught up there?
10.
How competitive is Planisware in agile? As I understand, the NQI acquisition had a lot of a blue-chip companies, but it seemed as though the buyers there were more in the IT departments. Has Planisware been able to grow and develop its product to be particularly competitive in the agile and IT space, or is it still lagging here? Micro Focus and a few other providers have developed something in value-stream management. Does Planisware have a comprehensive and competitive solution, or does it still have a way to go to compete and potentially win Atlassian customers?
11.
How far away do you think Planisware is on the agile element? It seems a lot of the product functionality is there, but the company lags rivals slightly in some areas.
12.
On which areas of the agile element do you think Planisware is not as good as rivals?
13.
I understand Planisware has historically been really strong in the pharma and engineering piece. The company talks about automotive, chemical, energy, financial services as well as pharma on the website. Why has it historically been so appealing to those verticals? Are there enough remaining opportunities in those verticals for Planisware to sustain the 15% YoY growth rate, or does it have to expand into IT to be able to maintain that historical growth rate?
14.
Regarding SPM tool penetration within the verticals that Planisware has historically focused on, do you think the company has almost saturated those, or is there still enough opportunity there?
15.
How would you rank the Enterprise product set, especially now with v7, in the market for SPM tools? It seems to be Planisware, Broadcom and Planview. How would you benchmark Planisware? What are the product’s key strengths and weaknesses based on the v7 offering?
16.
Anecdotally, did you hear that the acquisitions and lack of integration at Planview were potential issues for customers who picked Planisware over Planview?
17.
Do you have a sense of how the v7 transition has gone with existing customers? How much of the Enterprise revenue growth has been driven just by switching existing customers onto v7 – if Planisware customers have to pay more to do that – rather than going out and winning new business?
18.
It sounds as though you were being incentivised to only sell net new clients the SaaS offering. Were existing V6 customers shifting to v7 incentivised to move to the SaaS offering? What proportion of the install base will now be on v7 SaaS?
19.
Roughly how much more is an SaaS licence vs maintenance? Traditionally, it would have been sold as a perpetual licence plus maintenance. For an existing customer paying maintenance fees and then moving over to v7 on SaaS, presumably Planisware would want some price uplift there. Is the SaaS price 10%, 20% or 30% higher than maintenance, or even more?
20.
Are customers happy to pay more when moving to SaaS? It’s quite a big uplift relative to the maintenance fees. Are barriers to switching or the value that v7 SaaS offers enough to justify that?
21.
It seems there was quite a big growth acceleration in the US revenue stream for Planisware in 2014-15. Did anything change around this time that drove that?
22.
What did Planisware’s NQI acquisition bring? How did it change the go-to-market, structure or culture within the company?
23.
Did you see significant cross-sell execution? Regarding tier 1 accounts for Enterprise, were you able to cross-sell in users that weren’t power users and only needed a less sophisticated tool, and that’s where Orchestra was winning seats?
24.
Let’s say an enterprise customer has 10 licences for Enterprise – if this is priced on per licence – then decides that as it only has one power user, it will reduce these to one and the remaining nine will go to Orchestra, which I assume has lower revenue per user or pricing model. Do you see any associated cannibalisation risk, or are these just very different products and will continue to grow without taking seats from one another?
25.
Orchestra is a smaller proportion of Planisware’s revenue than Enterprise. Is the market moving more towards one or the other, just based on the demand trends around an SPM or a more basic tool? Might Orchestra be more of a growth driver? How competitive is the Orchestra product? There are players such as Monday.com, which may be a bit more generic but generate a lot of investment.
26.
Did Planisware’s NQI acquisition impact its culture or go-to-market? How good was the team that was brought on from Orchestra?
27.
Are Planisware’s products actually integrated? If one user in a business is using Enterprise and one is using Orchestra, would they work seamlessly together?
28.
Is there anything you want to leave us with on Planisware, or anything we haven’t discussed that you would recommend anyone looking at this business to focus on?
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