The Week That Was
ServiceNow reported Q1 revenue of $3.77B, beating the $3.74B consensus. The stock dropped 15%. IBM's revenue growth slowed from 12.2% to 9%. Down 10%. Salesforce fell 7% on sector contagion alone.
The trigger: cautious guidance in April 2026 gets you obliterated. ServiceNow cut operating margin guidance from 32% to 31.5%, missed on billings, and stayed quiet on their AI revenue metric (last disclosed at $12.5B). That was enough.
Truist's analyst note captured the mood: "With heightened scrutiny on software vendors as frontier labs ramp enterprise revenue, the penalty for missteps becomes more severe."
YTD: A Sector-Wide Repricing
Pull up the year-to-date board. Out of 25 major B2B names, only DigitalOcean is meaningfully green (+96%). The rest:
- Monday.com: -75%
- Atlassian: -68%
- HubSpot: -63%
- Workday: -48%
- ServiceNow: -46%
- Salesforce: -35%
- Snowflake: -34%
Every company that sells per-seat workflow software is getting compressed. The market's thesis: if an agent can do the job, why pay per human?
But Zoom Out 12 Months
Switch to trailing 12-month performance and a different pattern emerges:
- DigitalOcean: +234%
- Cloudflare: +79%
- Twilio: +62%
- MongoDB: +56%
- Datadog: +32%
- CrowdStrike: +16%
Infrastructure beneath AI is printing. Edge compute, databases, observability, security: every new AI workload needs more of this, not less.
What This Means for Sales Teams
If you are selling seat-based workflow software, comp plans are getting scrutinized. ServiceNow just introduced "Agentic ACV" pricing (pay per task, not per seat). That shift is coming to every B2B category.
If you are selling infrastructure, hiring is holding. These companies need AEs who can sell consumption-based models at enterprise scale. Base $140k-160k, OTE $240k-280k for enterprise roles in ANZ, tracking 10-15% above 2024 numbers.
The market is not saying software is dead. It is saying one specific business model is repricing: $50-150 per seat per month for workflows an agent can handle. Everything else depends on where you sit in the stack.
ServiceNow's Sydney and Melbourne offices (50-100 headcount) have not announced changes, but watch Q2 guidance in July. IBM's ANZ consulting sales team (~300 headcount) is already adjusting quotas for software deceleration. Oracle and Salesforce ANZ operations (300-1,000 headcount respectively) are holding hiring but extending ramp periods from 3 to 6 months.
Bottom line: infrastructure sales roles are safe and growing. Seat-based SaaS roles are getting quota relief and comp adjustments. The 12-month data says this is a rotation, not a collapse.