Horizontal SaaS

IBM's Software business slowed in the second quarter of 2026, with revenues up 5% year over year to $7.8 billion but organic revenue growth flat, as weakness in the Transaction Processing business drove an 8% revenue decline there. The company attributed the shortfall to customers shifting capital spending toward servers, storage and memory to secure supply-constrained infrastructure ahead of anticipated price increases, which left several large software deals unclosed within the expected timeframe. Still, roughly 80% of annual Software revenues is recurring, and Red Hat remained a key growth engine, with Hybrid Cloud revenues up 11% and OpenShift ARR reaching $2.2 billion, while the Data business grew 19% year over year. The acquisitions of HashiCorp and Confluent strengthened IBM's automation, data and hybrid-cloud capabilities, and Software segment profit rose 9% to $2.5 billion with segment margin up 110 basis points to 32.2%. IBM faces competition from Microsoft, whose Productivity & Business Processes segment generated $37.8 billion in June-quarter revenues, up 14% year over year, and from Oracle, whose cloud revenues surged 47% in USD and 46% in cc to $9.9 billion even as its Software revenues fell 2% to $6.8 billion.

Commvault Systems has enabled its managed service provider partners to deliver FedRAMP High Authorized Commvault Cloud for Government services to U.S. federal agencies and defense contractors, broadening the company's public sector reach. The move lands on a stock with a 7 day share price return of 10.29% and a 90 day share price gain of 11.67%, though its 1 year total shareholder return is down 23.35% while the 3 year total shareholder return is up 111.68%. The most followed valuation narrative puts fair value at $161.15 against a last close of $145.21, implying roughly 10% upside, and rests on analyst expectations of about 10.6% annual revenue growth, profit margins rising toward 9.8%, and an 8.85% discount rate. That story leans on recurring SaaS economics, including 63% SaaS ARR growth, a 45% increase in multi-product customers, and 125% SaaS net dollar retention. A contrasting read notes the stock trades at a P/E of 88.1x versus 30.5x for the wider US Software group and a fair ratio of 38.7x, signaling valuation risk if sentiment cools.

Google's Rethink ROI summit in New York spotlighted a widening gap between rapid AI-driven shopping discovery and merchant payment systems that cannot yet complete agent-initiated transactions. The platform's new conversational attributes let retailers feed structured data, including FAQ, compatible accessories, and substitutes, directly into the Shopping Graph, and in early testing with Lululemon, brand-supplied attributes were incorporated into AI Mode recommendations 50% of the time. Demand for such tools is backed by Adobe Analytics data showing an 805% year-over-year increase in AI-driven traffic to retail sites during Black Friday 2025, while Salesforce Cyber Week data confirms retailers with integrated AI agents grew sales 32% faster than those without, and Adobe found those shoppers are 38% more likely to convert. That traffic, however, is colliding with a payment readiness deficit: the TLT LLP Retail Agility survey of the top 100 UK retailers found that while 49% are investing in agentic AI, only 15% say their payment systems are prepared for agent-initiated transactions. Google is attempting to standardize the transaction layer through the Universal Commerce Protocol and the Universal Cart framework, which aim to enable persistent, cross-platform shopping carts across Search, YouTube, and Gmail, and with a 10-week horizon to Black Friday 2026, the next two months will determine which brands move from discovery-focused AI to transaction-ready agentic commerce.

Docusign shares have climbed 13.4% over the past month as customer expansion improved and Intelligent Agreement Management became a larger share of annual recurring revenue. IAM represented 15.1% of total ARR in the second quarter of fiscal 2027, up from 12.6% in the first quarter and 10.8% at fiscal 2026 year-end, and management expects the mix to reach 18%-19% exiting the fourth quarter. The company ended the July quarter with more than 1.9 million customers, up nearly 10% year over year, while direct-customer dollar net retention improved to 103% and customers spending more than $300,000 in annual contract value rose 14% to nearly 1,300. Docusign raised fiscal 2027 revenue guidance to $3.499-$3.507 billion, implying about 9% growth at the midpoint, with ARR growth expected at 8.5%-9% and a full-year non-GAAP operating margin of 31%-31.5%. In the latest quarter, adjusted earnings of $1.16 per share rose 26.1% and topped the Zacks Consensus Estimate of $1.08, while free cash flow climbed 35.9% to $295.8 million and the company repurchased $306.5 million of stock, leaving $2.1 billion authorized for future buybacks.

Snap disclosed that Salesforce is embedding its Agentforce agent platform into its Specs augmented reality glasses, with NVIDIA supplying the artificial intelligence that lets the device interpret what a worker is looking at and pull up relevant company data, and Amazon contributing its cloud unit's assistant for voice-command tasks. Snap also unveiled a Specs Intelligence service, with a separately sold charging case carrying cellular connectivity through carrier partners including Verizon Communications in the U.S. The device was unveiled in June at $2,195, and Snap did not disclose financial terms for any of the tie-ups, so the move prices a positioning change rather than booked business. Snap stock rose about 4% to $5.95 on the news, while Meta Platforms, the incumbent in consumer AR through Ray-Ban Meta and Reality Labs, held steady with shares up 0.4% to $675.88. Snap stock remains down 28% year to date, and Snap has said shipping begins later this fall in the U.S., the U.K., and France, with a Los Angeles shopping-mall try-on experience starting in October.

HubSpot announced a new AI Growth Bundle with OpenAI, built around deep product integration between the two firms. The package includes HubSpot's new Breeze Assistant, a conversational AI tool designed to help teams work across marketing, sales and service workflows, and an autonomous Smart CRM that updates itself using AI, adding advanced automation and decision-support features. The release features what the company describes as the first CRM integration with ChatGPT Ads, targeting customers who run AI-generated campaigns inside HubSpot. The AI Growth Bundle, Breeze Assistant and autonomous Smart CRM are only one part of the broader HubSpot story for investors, and the company has also flagged 2 warning signs for HubSpot. HubSpot runs a cloud-based CRM platform used by businesses across the Americas, Europe and Asia Pacific, and the company's narrative points toward a $243 fair value for the stock.

June AI announced it is now part of the Salesforce AgentExchange ecosystem, Salesforce's trusted partner marketplace for partner-built AI interfaces, agents, apps, skills, integrations and services. The AI implementation and deployment company said its agents understand a customer's Salesforce environment, translate requirements into implementation plans, and assist with configuration, testing and deployment, helping customers move faster from planning to production while preserving existing data models, permissions and governance. Tyler Carlson, SVP, Head of Product, AgentExchange & Ecosystem at Salesforce, said the company's Headless Toolkit, which provides MCP and API access to Salesforce data, workflows, business logic, actions, identity, permissions and governance, lets builders connect those experiences to Salesforce context. June AI co-founder and CEO Efrat Rappoport said realizing AI's potential requires each use case to be implemented inside the systems a company actually runs. June was founded by the team behind Bonobo AI, which Salesforce acquired in 2019, and its founders spent five years in product and engineering leadership roles at Salesforce, contributing to the development of Agentforce.

Salesforce pushed deeper into the AI stack at Dreamforce by creating a bridge between its business data and outside AI models, a move that sent shares down approximately 1.4% to $252.10 Wednesday. The offering, AIforce, connects Salesforce data, applications and autonomous agents with platforms including Slack and Anthropic's Claude, while the company also introduced Koa, a model built with Nvidia's Nemotron technology and Salesforce's massive store of CRM data. Salesforce is leaning harder into consumption-based pricing, meaning revenue growth increasingly depends on how much customers actually use these AI tools rather than how many software seats they purchase. Agentforce annual recurring revenue has already topped $1.5 billion, equivalent to roughly 3.2% of the midpoint of Salesforce's $46.25 billion fiscal-year revenue guidance, and adding Data 360 lifts that comparison to about 8.4%. At $252.10, the stock sits 26.52% below the $343.08 GF Value estimate, a gap that will depend on Salesforce proving easier AI distribution can translate into durable consumption growth without sacrificing its projected 20.1% GAAP operating margin.

Microsoft has told federal buyers that a new top government tier of its productivity suite, plus a companion agent-management product, will be available for Government Community Cloud customers to purchase on October 1, with individual capabilities lighting up in phases as each workload clears its required government security accreditation. The new suite layers Copilot, identity and security tooling, and agent-governance controls on top of the prior government tier, with the headline addition being Agent 365, which Microsoft has framed on the commercial side as providing security operations, financial operations, and observability and manageability of token spending across business processes. Microsoft has not disclosed per-seat pricing for the new tier or paid conversion rates from earlier no-cost federal Copilot deployments, leaving any government revenue forecast impossible, and the stock closed at $497.12, down 2.74% over the past year. On the commercial side, net paid seats more than doubled sequentially to over 30 million Copilot seats, while full-year capital expenditures hit $115.95 billion and free cash flow fell 23.19% in the quarter. Analysts carry an average price target of $572.92 with 38 Buy and 14 Strong Buy ratings, and the variable that decides the bull and bear cases is what Microsoft discloses in coming quarters about paid government seat counts and workload authorization progress rather than the October launch itself.

FloQast announced a suite of AI-powered accounting innovations at its annual TakeControl user conference and named Lucia Wind, Board Chair and outgoing Executive Director of COSO, as SVP of Risk & Audit Advisory. The new products include FloQast Transform, which reverse-engineers a team's monthly workflows into AI agents that are documented, tested against previously approved numbers, and auditor-ready with no IT or coding required; a COSO GenAI Module that operationalizes COSO's generative AI governance framework inside the platform; an AI Assistant whose first application reviews journal entries before accountants approve them, flagging errors and anomalies, scoring audit risk, and recommending fixes while leaving every call to the human; FloQast Detect, an AI transaction monitoring tool that learns normal patterns per subsidiary and per account and flags anomalies before the books close; and FloQast Operational Audit, an expansion of the company's internal audit capabilities to cover the entire audit plan, including SOX testing, other compliance audits, and now operational audits. Wind oversaw COSO's publication of its generative AI governance framework earlier this year, the same framework FloQast is operationalizing in the COSO AI Module, beginning with a full capability, risk and control mapping. The two-day TakeControl event, held September 16–17, brings together 40 speakers from companies including AWS, Equinox, EY, and Meta and offers more than 10 CPE credits.

Cisco Systems is expanding its Splunk portfolio with new artificial intelligence security and observability capabilities after the unit posted double-digit order growth in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2026. Splunk contributed to several whole-portfolio agreements, added more than 280 customer logos and notched its highest number of competitive wins in any quarter of fiscal 2026, pushing Cisco past its full-year target of adding 1,000 Splunk customer logos. The enhancements include Cisco AI POD for Splunk, expanded AI-agent observability, Tokenomics capabilities and stronger agentic security operations, aimed at helping enterprises deploy, secure and monitor agentic AI at scale. More than 1,500 customers bought newer Cisco security products such as Secure Access, XDR, Hypershield and AI Defense in the fiscal fourth quarter, while the acquisitions of Galileo Technologies and Astrix Securities broaden Cisco's observability and security reach. The push puts Cisco up against Datadog, whose AI offerings include Agent Observability, Agent Console, Data Observability, GPU Monitoring and AI Guard, and CrowdStrike, whose Next-Gen SIEM ending ARR surpassed $695 million and whose Falcon Shield ARR surged more than 185% year over year in the second quarter of fiscal 2027. Cisco shares have appreciated 42.9% year to date, and the Zacks Consensus Estimate for earnings stands at $1.32 per share, implying 32% growth.

Bridgewater Associates opened new positions in two AI stocks during the second quarter, according to billionaire Ray Dalio's fund's 13F filings. The fund bought about 635,000 shares of ServiceNow worth roughly $63 million, a 0.26% portfolio weight, and about 999,000 shares of Nutanix worth roughly $51 million, a 0.21% weight. Nutanix ended fiscal 2026 with recurring revenue of $2.55 billion, up 16%, and added more than 3,000 new customers during the year, though its stock is down 11% over the past year. Management said external storage support drove several seven-figure deals in the fourth quarter and expects it to be the largest single growth contributor in fiscal 2027, while Nutanix has also been picking up business from customers leaving Broadcom's VMware after price increases and licensing changes. Revenue growth is slowing, from 18% in fiscal 2025 to 12% in fiscal 2026, with guidance for 12% again in fiscal 2027, and server shortages are expected to last all of fiscal 2027. The stock trades around 29 times forward earnings against a technology sector median near 22, with enterprise value to sales at about 5.3 against a sector median of 3.5.

UK toy retailer The Entertainer has selected THG Commerce as its digital commerce partner under a multi-year contract to overhaul its online and in-store customer experience. THG Commerce, part of THG Ingenuity, will design, build and power The Entertainer's next-generation digital platform, part of the retailer's wider push to build an omnichannel offer combining in-store curation with digital convenience and personalisation. The new platform will include AI-driven shopping support, conversational discovery and intent-based search tools, drawing on THG Ingenuity's partnership with Google Cloud using Vertex AI Commerce Search and Gemini. The partnership also covers a redesigned web and mobile experience and an upgraded Click & Collect process, and the updated platform is scheduled to go live in early 2027, built with future expansion in mind across loyalty programmes, retail media and social commerce. The Entertainer digital and marketing director Malcolm Carter said the ambition is to redefine the experience for anyone looking to discover and buy toys, while THG Ingenuity chief revenue officer Darren Rajanah said the retailer gets AI-enabled shopping assistance and CRM-integrated enhanced personalisation at launch, then a roadmap into loyalty, retail media and social commerce.

HubSpot generated $222.8 million in cash from operating activities in the second quarter, up from $164.4 million a year earlier, with non-GAAP free cash flow climbing 44% year over year to $167.9 million. The company's second-quarter revenues rose 20% year over year to $911.7 million, while subscription revenues also grew 20% to $894 million. Non-GAAP operating income jumped 44% to $185.3 million, and the non-GAAP operating margin expanded to 20.3% from 17% in the prior-year quarter. HubSpot credits growing adoption of its AI native products, monetization through core seats and credits, multi-hub adoption and larger upmarket deals for the stronger cash generation. For comparison, Salesforce posted second-quarter fiscal 2027 operating cash flow of $1.27 billion, up 71%, and free cash flow of $1.1 billion, up 81%, while Microsoft's fourth-quarter fiscal 2026 cash flow from operations rose about 30% to $55.4 billion even as free cash flow fell 23% to $19.6 billion on heavier infrastructure spending.

Dun & Bradstreet announced new Model Context Protocol integrations with Microsoft Copilot Studio and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales agents, letting organizations build and deploy AI agents grounded in business identity, relationships, and risk data. Clients can use the D&B Commercial Graph to customize agentic workflows across finance and credit, compliance, sales and marketing, and enterprise master data management use cases in Microsoft Copilot Studio. The integration also lets users enrich Microsoft's prebuilt Dynamics 365 Sales agents, including the Sales Qualification Agent and Sales Opportunity Agent, with D&B's continually verified business context, so agents can research accounts, qualify leads, assess opportunity health, identify risk signals, and prioritize seller actions. Anchored by the D-U-N-S Number business identifier, the D&B Commercial Graph provides a verified identity layer that helps agents operate from the same commercial foundation across systems and workflows, with custom or Microsoft-built Copilot agents able to access it in near real-time. Elizabeth Barrette, General Manager for Master Data Management Solutions at Dun & Bradstreet, said the quality of data informing AI agents becomes increasingly important as organizations deploy more of them, and that the D&B Commercial Graph provides a consistent foundation of verified business identity, relationships and risk data.

Quick Transformation Public Company Limited, or QUICK, is pressing ahead with its plan for an initial public offering of up to 32 million new ordinary shares, representing no more than 31.37% of the total shares outstanding after the IPO, and is preparing to list on the mai market. Chief Executive Officer Paisan Saelee said QUICK has more than 20 years of experience and specialises in ERP systems built on Microsoft Dynamics 365, which serves as the core of an organisation's IT, linking data from IoT and extending it with AI to analyse information, support decision-making and improve business efficiency. Jirayong Anumanrajadhon, Chairman of Jay Capital Advisory Company Limited, acting as financial advisor, said QUICK's strength lies in its ERP expertise, which it has extended into comprehensive Digital Transformation services, developing solutions under the QUICK brand such as Quick MES, Quick PM, Quick Carbon R, Quick CRM and Qoot AI, positioning it to capture opportunities from Automation, Smart Factory and AI. QUICK plans to hold an IPO Public Roadshow soon to introduce its business potential and growth direction to investors.

SAP CEO Christian Klein predicts that typing data into business systems will end within two to three years at the software giant, calling voice the next workplace advantage. "The end of the keyboard is near," Klein said, pointing to the strength of voice recognition in large language models and saying the remaining work is translating voice into business language and business data. He said SAP coworkers will increasingly use voice to ask analytical questions, trigger operational workflows, and make entries such as performance feedback and pipeline updates, adding that the technological capabilities exist and the challenge is execution. Klein, 44, the youngest CEO of a major company listed on Germany's DAX index, said AI delivers value only when applied horizontally across a whole business rather than as an efficiency hack inside one division, and cited a large consumer goods customer where SAP is building an end-to-end planning scenario with agents that helps optimize inventory by 20%. Speaking at the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, he also warned that geopolitics is reshaping software requirements, with companies asking how to operate in a more fragmented world of sovereignty rules, geo-locking, and export controls, and said Europe is a superpower in regulation but not in unity.

Anthropic launched Claude for Financial Advisors on September 14, connecting the AI assistant to Charles Schwab, BlackRock and other industry platforms so advisers can pull client and portfolio information into Claude for meeting prep, portfolio review and documentation. Charles Schwab is the first RIA custodian integrated with the offering, and says more than 16,000 independent RIAs will be able to connect Claude to Schwab Advisor Center through an authenticated connection, serving firms with over $5.5 trillion in assets. BlackRock contributes portfolio construction expertise, model portfolios and institutional analytics through Advisor Center, after ending the second quarter with $15.3 trillion in assets under management and posting a 13% year-over-year rise in technology-services and subscription revenue on continued Aladdin momentum. Anthropic says the plugin works across a long list of portfolio systems, CRMs and planning tools, and recommends Enterprise plans with audit logs to meet recordkeeping and compliance obligations. Insider Monkey's database showed 95 hedge funds long SCHW in the second quarter, down from 101 in the first, while BLK holders rose to 84 from 79.

Four major infrastructure vendors have now shipped standalone agent governance products at general availability, a rush that has itself become the signal that agent governance is decoupling from individual platforms to become a category of its own. Okta pushed furthest into new territory with its July 2026 product innovations, shipping Agent-to-Agent Connections at general availability to enable secure multi-agent workflows through temporary runtime tokens that enforce which agents may invoke which others, alongside the Agent Gateway, available as a research release, which sits between agents and the systems they access without requiring code changes. IBM's Think 2026 announcement positioned next-generation watsonx Orchestrate as an agentic control plane, introduced in June on AWS and IBM Cloud, offering runtime policy management, credential health monitoring, and an Agent Access overview across an organization's entire agent estate. Broadcom embedded governance directly into the compute fabric with AgentMinder, unveiled at VMware Explore on August 31 and shipping at general availability bundled into the VMware Private AI Cloud, treating agents as enterprise-grade identities bound to a declared mission, permitted intents, approved tools, and authorized resources. Dataiku made a different architectural bet, with Dataiku Agent Management scanning agents across nine platforms including Microsoft Copilot Studio, Salesforce Agentforce, AWS Bedrock, and Google Vertex to provide a cross-platform control tower for discovery, certification, and audit-readiness. The urgency tracks to two numbers: Menlo Ventures found that 76 percent of AI applications are purchased rather than built internally, and the Cloud Security Alliance reported in February that 84 percent of organizations doubt they could pass a compliance audit focused on agent behavior or access controls.

Cisive said it is the only Oracle Independent Software Vendor partner delivering background checks natively into Oracle Fusion Cloud Human Capital Management, eight months after joining Oracle's enhanced partner program. The company said growing adoption of its PreCheck LicenseManager Pro for Oracle among Oracle Fusion HCM customers has cemented that exclusive position. LicenseManager Pro bridges pre- and post-hire compliance, keeping license and credential data current directly inside Oracle as the system of record, a task healthcare organizations previously managed by hand. Cisive Chief Executive Officer Margaret Keane said being the only Oracle ISV partner for background screening gives customers a real advantage as more Oracle HCM customers in regulated industries adopt LicenseManager Pro. The integration extends beyond healthcare to any organization in a highly regulated industry running Oracle Fusion HCM.

Zoom Communications introduced its vision for an AI-powered revenue OS, a unified system connecting buyer intelligence, customer conversations, and revenue execution in one platform. The company announced new Zoom Revenue Accelerator capabilities, Engage and Forecast, along with the availability of Common Room by Zoom, which is now available for purchase through Zoom. Engage builds structured multichannel sales sequences across email and phone, while Forecast turns deal-level signals into a live forecast with drill-down from company commitments to individual opportunities. A new ZRA Elite offering combines ZRA Premium with Engage and Forecast, and Zoom Revenue Accelerator remains available in three tiers: Essentials, Premium, and Elite. Zoom cited customer Barracuda Networks reporting a 15% increase in deals closed, 5% faster deal velocity, and sales reps reaching 100–140% of quota using Zoom Revenue Accelerator, and noted IDC recognized Zoom as a Leader in its 2026 MarketScape for unified revenue orchestration.

Gainsight announced new headless agentic integrations with Agentforce and Slack to help revenue teams act on customer intelligence that predicts retention and expansion. The integrations, available through Model Context Protocol connectors, bring customer health, risk, expansion and learning signals with next-best action directly into Agentforce and Slackbot across Gainsight's Customer Success, Staircase AI, Skilljar, Customer Communities and Product Experience products. Customers can also buy Gainsight's pre-built agents now integrated with Salesforce, including Expansion Analyst, and the company is adding new packages to simplify integration setup. Gainsight CEO Chuck Ganapathi said the answer to higher retention is not another generic agent but giving agents the context to see how a customer is adopting a product and the ability to take the next-best action. The company cited McKinsey's analysis of more than 100 B2B SaaS companies, which found top-quartile valuation multiples came with median net revenue retention of 113% versus 98% for the bottom quartile, and median enterprise-value-to-revenue multiples of 24x and 5x, respectively. Gainsight will showcase the integrations at Dreamforce Booth #316 in San Francisco from September 15 to 17, 2026.

Rimini Street Inc. announced a strategic partnership with Datacom under which Datacom will resell Rimini Support for Oracle and SAP software to public and private sector customers across Australia and New Zealand. Under the reseller agreement, Datacom will offer level 4 support services, security and compliance solutions powered by Rimini Street to clients running perpetually licensed versions of Oracle and SAP software, without requiring them to upgrade or give up their licenses. Rimini Street said clients can save up to 90% of total enterprise software support costs and redirect IT budget and talent toward digital transformation, cloud migration and AI-driven projects. Shirley Riddick, GVP and regional GM for ANZ at Rimini Street, called it a first-of-its-kind partnership for the company in the region, saying organisations can deploy Agentic AI in weeks rather than months on top of their existing systems. Dave Payne, director of Core Platforms for Australia and New Zealand at Datacom, said the partnership extends the life and value of clients' enterprise software investments so they can continue on their AI journeys.