Product managers must become adept at developing estimates of achievable revenue to drive growth and guide investments. Market models must be sensitive to economic conditions, buying segment desires, competitor movements, geographic nuances and channel capabilities. Gartner produces over 750,000 forecast data points every quarter and in this session, you will get to ask Gartner’s Chief forecaster how we forecast, and how Gartner’s forecasting can improve your proficiency in gathering data, developing assumptions, and modeling achievable revenue.

Cloud computing has already reduced the cost of entry for application vendors. There are an increasing number of small SaaS providers delivering new specialized applications, based on new approaches and providing niche functionality. Assembly of solutions using these specialized capabilities is causing the major SaaS and application vendors to rearchitect their relatively strongly coupled application suites into more discrete business capabilities.

These agile, fast growing start-ups (Unicorns) and frenemy Digital Dragons (Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Alibaba, etc),) have global reach and limitless scaling. Their appetite for your customers and your customers’ customers is insatiable. None of these market disruptions will be limited by geography as the global enterprise application market will be disrupted at a pace hitherto unseen.

Application vendors must prepare their organization for the future of applications to avoid being trampled by the unicorns or devoured by the dragons.