Flexera is working overtime to catch up with ServiceNow's dominance in the industry, but rather than innovating, they're starting to impersonate which only leads to a business that is rapidly falling behind it's biggest competitor.
The company continues to make aggressive acquisitions to fill in gaps in their vision. But because these technologies are acquired rather than organically grown from R&D, there's no cohesive and unified vision. This strategy of buying rather than innovating impacts performance, and just never quite works. Products that were never designed to work together are placed next to each other in a patchwork of features. What should be a fantastic suite of tools is really just a disjointed and overlapping mess.
Leadership in middle and lower management is a disaster, and senior leadership doesn't seem to know it. There's a propensity for hiring and promoting "Yes" men and women rather than leaders. This leads to a distracting focus on kissing-up, process and use of tools rather than leadership that drives revenue.
Moreover, I've never experienced a field sales organization who conducts as many internal meetings, mandatory training, etc. I wholeheartedly embrace strong communications with management, but Flexera takes this to an absurd level - the internal meetings are a serious distraction that has sales teams doing more work for internal meeting prep than actual customer engagement.
Finally, operations and corporate administration are a nightmare. There's an "Itasca mafia" that is untouchable, and fundamentally under-performant. Everything from doing expense reports to developing customer quotes is hindered by a disastrous mess of conflicting systems and SKUs. Acquisitions have turned the price book into an impossible maze of conflicting and overlapping products. This same acquisition strategy also means that there is no central database of the customer install base - this makes renewals and up-selling completely impractical, and basically guess-work.
I was recruited to work at Flexera - accepting their offer was a major mistake.
