New-Speak at its best!

[The Byre]

I read the following magnificent piece of New-Speak in a corporate statement yesterday. It is from a tech company whose management has totally run the company into the ground with poor decisions, bad customer relations, fired key development staff, daft M&As, lack of R&D, massive debts, you name 'em and they've done it!

They compounded all that, with the disastrous mistake of trying to go all-cloud-based in a market that does not accept cloud based 'solutions' and with products that are full of bugs and have not been updated in nearly a decade!

The result was that earnings have fallen off a cliff - so they compounded poor business policies with bad English - as follows -

"Our Bookings and non-GAAP Revenue fell short of guidance due primarily to the transition of the storage product line, as some existing enterprise clients deferred normal upgrade and renewal decisions and new customers postponed investments until the release of functionality targeted to the enterprise market. We believe the enterprise-class functionality recently rolled out for new storage products will set the course for improved growth, but not enough to make up the third quarter shortfall. In light of these factors and continued volatility in the enterprise market, we are more heavily risk-adjusting the timing of certain enterprise deals and reducing our financial guidance for full-year 2016."

I have translated some of it into English -

existing enterprise clients deferred normal upgrade and renewal decisions = old business customers are no longer returning

new customers postponed investments = new customers are staying away in droves

reducing our financial guidance for full-year 2016 = we fear this is the beginning of the end

But I am struggling with the phrase "we are more heavily risk-adjusting the timing of certain enterprise deals". This sounds like "We are having to turn down some larger business contracts, as we cannot find the money to finance them and we'd otherwise run out of cash!"

But any other suggestions are welcome!

 

[Clinton]

"we are more heavily risk-adjusting the timing of certain enterprise deals"
=
we expect a reduction in cashflow i.e. we are going to be selling far less to the entreprise market over this time period than we expected.

In other words, while they are proactively converging their architecture to ensure enterprise grade functionality is a delivable across legacy storage products, customer conceptualisation of deliverability timescales and their expectations of early empowerment are not aligned with management's strategic objectives of controlled functionality release. This black swan customer response creates a changed paradigm, with associated financial implications, but it is envisioned that the company's resource maximising exercise will ultimately progress the company's strategic vision and corporate goal to maximise revenue extraction from the transition.

Simples!

 

[The Byre]

In other words, while they are proactively converging their architecture to ensure enterprise grade functionality is a delivable across legacy storage products, customer conceptualisation of deliverability timescales and their expectations of early empowerment are not aligned with management's strategic objectives of controlled functionality release. This black swan customer response creates a changed paradigm, with associated financial implications, but it is envisioned that the company's resource maximising exercise will ultimately progress the company's strategic vision and corporate goal to maximise revenue extraction from the transition.

When you explain it like that, it all seems so simple!