by Kevin Dobbs

Montclair Advisors, LLC

When advising software clients who are interested in moving to a SaaS business model, one of the areas I really dig into is how are they selling to new customers. Most of us in the SaaS community realize that carefully tracking your Customer Acquisition Costs or CAC, is a critical component in building a successful and profitable company, but I think it is equally important to understand how traditional software sales  and marketing models and SaaS models differ.

Traditional Software Sales & Marketing Model

Over the past 25 years there has been a traditional way to market and sell enterprise software which has been based on key principles such as:

• You need a Large direct sales force including a large support team, or as I used to call them, ‘The Cast of Thousands‘
• Front loaded compensation plans that pay out when deals are sold
  
• High average sales prices, including services, that would almost always be over $500,000
• Long sales cycles, usually 6-12 months, with pursuit costs averaging around $70,000 for every deal the company played in
• Win rates are in the 30-50% range
• Average face-to-face selling time that is around 15%
• Pipeline building using a combination of in-person events (seminars, tradeshows, user group meetings), telemarketing teams (inbound and cold calling) pounding the phones and a lot of paid marketing campaigns
• Lead pipelines that appeared full but always seemed to lack the appropriate level of qualified opportunities
• First generation CRM systems and reports that were produced periodically using Excel

Brings back the good ol’ days doesn’t it.  Many software firms are still using this model and they are finding out that it doesn’t work very well in the new world of Software-as-a-Service sales.  Some of the reasons it doesn’t work is that software buyer preferences are definitely changing, but one big issue is it is very expensive to operate this type of model, especially when you get your revenues paid out over time.

SaaS Sales & Marketing Model

There are several important differences in the SaaS model that make the traditional software sales and marketing model less than effective;

• SaaS customers pay a subscription based on users or usage of the software service over time, usually over three years.  After the recession, this has become the new normal for software sales
• More focused solutions that usually have Average Sales Prices that are typically lower, so reps need to sell more deals to hit the same quota targets
• Key metrics like customer satisfaction, renewals, up-selling and cross selling are even more important for SaaS than they were in the past
• Sales method is more of a “penetrate and radiate” approach
• It takes a long time to build up a recurring revenue stream

Given these differences, then what should your SaaS Sales & Marketing model look like?  Here are some ideas to consider when building out your SaaS sales and marketing plans for 2011 that can help you to build out a low-cost but high-efficiency sales and marketing machine;

Marketing

• Hire experienced marketing leadership and professional
• Evolve a good list of key influencers and industry contact and communicate with them frequently
• Develop a clean prospect database
• Mix paid and free social networking programs
• Build a vibrant customer community and market to them with products like Lithium
• Leverage social media like LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter to generate interest and leads
• Use Web 2.0 marketing tools like Marketo, Eloqua, Pardot and try drip marketing
• Track everything (see the last Smart SaaS post)

Sales

• Hire experienced SaaS sales leadership and reps
• Your SaaS sales team should be more low touch than your traditional sales team
• Experiment with telesales even with high end enterprise products
• See is using an indirect channel makes sense for your business, if managed correctly these distribution partnerships can dramatically lower your sales costs
• Carefully track your lead hand off between marketing and sales, make sure leads are not falling through the cracks
• Track everything

Metrics like Customer Acquisition Costs and the Magic Number can help your sales and marketing teams see how effective their programs are and can provide insight when to invest and when to continue developing your repeatable sales model.  I would also encourage you to learn more about Mark Leslie’s Sales Learning Curve, because it offers a more scientific approach to cost-effectively building out your SaaS sales team.   Best-in-class firms that have profiled in this blog have adopted many of these techniques to build a scalable but cost-careful sales and marketing organizations.

Stay tuned for Tip #6 Package for Viral Adoption

Continue reading…

By Kevin Dobbs

Montclair Advisors, LLC

When thinking about your transition to SaaS, there are many questions to consider including target customers, value propositions, packaging, pricing and how best to build customer relationships.

After conducting more than 50 Smart SaaS business profiles of all different types including pure SaaS, Hybrids and Cross-Overs, all of these companies would probably answer many of these types of questions differently depending on their type of customer, functionality, geography, vertical markets and the only way they can get useful answers is to continually test everything.   Best in class SaaS firms are always trying different pricing, packages, messages in order to optimize their businesses, like a recent firm we profiled - Clarizen.

Some resources when thinking about these types of considerations include:

Software Pricing Partners - Jim Geisman

Chaotic Flow - Joel York

SaaS Blogs

Sixteen Ventures - Lincoln Murphy

4 Pillars of SaaS - Phil Wainewright, ZDNet

In addition to testing, it is a good idea to measure everything including website traffic, marketing campaigns, product usage, customer satisfaction and a myriad of other SaaS and business metrics.  Again, the best firms track and monitor all the key business metrics in order to improve their ability to generate revenues, build market share and reduce unnecessary customer churn.  SaaS requires a very tight operational model and has moved business an art to a science and now there are an entire new class to tools to improve revenue performance and reduce costs.  Some of these next generation of tools include:

Sales Automation

EchoSign - Provides electronic signature and contract management.

InsideView - Sales business intelligence and social media platform.

JigSaw - Business information and data services.

NetSuite - CRM and ERP suite.

RightNow - CRM, call center and social platform.

Salesforce.com - Salesforce is not only a solid Customer Relationship Management system but also a great system of record for all types of sales, marketing and service information and applications. Also offers a application marketplace that provides value added extensions.  Salesforce also offers Chatter a collaboration platform to improve internal communications.

SugarCRM - Open source based CRM that provides a robust no cost solution.

Marketing Automation

Eloqua - Marketing automation platform.

Genius.com - Sales and lead automation.

MarketBright - Marketing and lead generation management.

Marketo - Marketing and revenue management.

Pardot - Business to Business lead automation.

SaaS Analytics

Birst - On demand business intelligence product.

Cloud9 Analytics - SaaS performance management.

GoodData - SaaS business intelligence product.

PivotLink - On demand business intelligence product.

Using many of these tools companies can help a SaaS firm track their business, sales and marketing performance.  The question that I often get is ‘what should I be tracking?’  There are an emerging set of SaaS-based business metrics that include Monthly Recurring Revenues (MRR), Churn, Customer Acquisition Costs (CAC), The Magic Number (MN) and others that provide very precise views into how a SaaS business is performing.  Here is a chart that details some of the more common SaaS business metrics by functional area:

Other resources to learn about SaaS metrics;

5 C’s of SaaS Finance - Bessemer Ventures

Chaotic Flow - Joel York

For Entrepreneaurs - David Skok, Matrix Partners

Haut Tech - Michael Dunham at Scio Development

My opinion about the SaaS business model is that there are a lot of new considerations about building a profitable subscription business today.  The buyers are different, there are many robust low-cost tools available, Cloud technology that can radically change your cost model and time to market as well as many other business factors, so the only real way to really tune your business for SaaS is to continually test everything!

I would be interested in your comments and hearing about what you are testing.

Stay tuned for Tip #4 Sales & Marketing on a Budget

By Kevin Dobbs

Montclair Advisors, LLC

Let’s face it, Hunters and Farmers are very different types of sales people.  One is into the thrill of the chase and the high anxiety of selling the next big deal.  The other is into cultivating relationships, building communities and patience.

When it comes to sales people inside of a SaaS company, these same attributes apply to this team as well.   Trying to get your major account or direct sales reps to effectively manage your existing accounts and still hit an aggressive quota, that usually doesn’t work that well.  The same holds true if you are trying to get your account managers to push their customers to close a big deal, and they just don’t want to push too hard because they might ruin their relationship.  Then why are you trying to get them to do the same job?

The other big difference is usually how these sales professionals get compensated.  A typical software sales rep will have a $1.5-$3M annual quota and want to make at least $200K, where as an account manager might have a much smaller quota, $300-$750K and be making $110-150K.  That’s because they have different skill sets but both types of sales are critically important when building your SaaS sales team. Philippe Botteri from BVP discusses what Gary Messiana an EIR told him about how he compensated his reps for delivering MRR:

• • For 0-25% of the quota, $0.25 commision per $1 of MRR
  • For 25%-50% of the quota, $0.5 per $1 of MRR
  • For 50%-75% of the quota, $1.0 per $1 of MRR
  • For 75%+ of the quota, $1.5 per $1 of MRR

I like the simplicity of the concept and it can be applied to all types of sales roles.

Depending on the type of products/services you are selling, you may actually not have high priced outside sales reps and actually focus more on building out a low cost tele-sales capability.  Even if you do this, you should still separate out your new sales team from your account management teams.  Because SaaS is perfect for the ‘penetrate and radiate‘ sales model, you need teams that can sell that first product and then another team that keeps the customer happy and renewing as well as buying more products and services.

Bessemer Venture’s  10 Laws for being SaaSy also recommends separating your hunters from your farmers.  It is important to be able to find new customers but it is also important to be able to renew, upsell and cross-sell customers additional products, which will increase your company’s Monthly Recurring Revenues.  This well defined sales structure works well with many of the leading SaaS firms including RightNow and Salesforce.com.

One of the big objections about this type of approach is that if forces the customer to deal with two different sales teams.  Although this can be a problem, I have found that these types of channel conflicts can be remedied by using team based compensation plans that have everyone getting paid based on shared goals related to existing customers.  This type of approach also encourages development of up-sells/cross-sell opportunities by the account management team, since they often require the new sales team to engage in these deals and close them.  The team compensation approach means everyone wins, including the customer.

I keep coming back to skills and personalities when structuring your SaaS organization.  Keep your teams small and focused.  Make sure you have ways for those promising team members, who might start out in tele-marketing or account management, to have a path to progress up the sales food chain.  Just make sure that your organization structure is well defined, there are clear rules of engagement and that that compensation plans encourage your sales teams to work together and keep your customers satisfied.

Stay tuned for Tip #3 Test Everything

Here is our updated Public Company SaaS interactive spreadsheet.  Enjoy!

Company:            Yammer

Started:                2007

Located:               San Francisco, California

Geography:          North America

Market:                Enterprise Microblogging Platform

Products:            Yammer Desktop, Yammer on your Mobile Device, and Yammer Plug-Ins

Key Customers:  Deloitte, AMD, AAA of Northern California, Nevada and Utah, SMG, Cargill, Thomson Reuters, Sungard, Hill & Knowlton and SunCorp.

Website:               Yammer

Blog:                    Yammer Blog

Twitter:                @Yammer

Recent News:

Yammer is Selected as an MIT Sloan CIO Symposium Innovation Showcase Finalist

Fortune 500 Companies Flock to Yammer

Yammer Secures $10 Million in Series B Funding from Emergence Capital and Previous Investors

I asked David Sacks, Yammer’s Founder, CEO and Chairman of the Board few questions about his business and his view of the SaaS market in 2010.

Did you start out as a Software-as-a-Service company?

Yes, we did start out as a SaaS company. Our company was incubated inside of Geni, which develops family tree software. I was also involved with the consumer Internet with my experience starting PayPal. As both companies scaled, I found it was hard to keep tabs on what everyone was doing, and Yammer was developed to address this challenge. We found that microblogging was a great way to keep current on the status of important projects, individual profiles and information feeds inside of an enterprise.

Then in 2008, we spun out Yammer and that same year won the TechCrunch 50’s Best in Show award.

Initially we were targeting small and medium sized businesses but we are now seeing that Yammer has strong appeal for large enterprises like AAA, AMD, Cargill, Cisco, Deloitte, and Thomson Reuters.

Yammer is very viral because it was very easy for anyone to sign-up, confirm their company’s email address and start using the system. You don’t need to wait for an IT administrator to set up Yammer and you can quickly invite your work colleagues, with the same company email domain, to join in and begin collaborating with you.

When a company wants to claim the network being used by it’s employees, they pay a nominal subscription fee, and then we provide a set of administrative tools that allow them to manage upgrades, security, compliance, deliver premium support, and customize their site.

Part of our initial business model was to base Yammer on the consumer model of software, but make it enterprise-class. We wanted to remove the traditional friction from our software sales process by making our product as easy to use as Facebook.

Why do your customers buy from Yammer?

Our customers never have to pay or upgrade our software unless their employees are using it. This is very attractive, when you compare it to the traditional software selection process where you have to vet vendors, choose one, negotiate the contract, implement the product, pay a lot of money and then no one uses it. Yammer is de-risking the traditional enterprise software value proposition. Employees are valuing it because they use it.

When large companies see thousands of employees using Yammer what do they do? They can do three things - wait and see what happens, shut it down or buy it and we are finding the vast majority of companies are buying Yammer because their employees are being productive and want to collaborate using the software.Our customers also really like our administrative tools for e-discovery, security, directory integration, and network administration.

“If Facebook and Twitter had a baby, it would be Yammer.”

We are like Twitter because we offer a real-time feed of information; you can follow any one, join groups and sort information feeds by hash tags. We are like Facebook because there is no 140-character limit, you can have attachments, threaded replies and we offer a variety of enterprise management tools.

Yammer is a like a virtual office where workers can feel more connected to each other, especially remote workers. We act like the traditional company water cooler for these distributed organizations. As workforces become more mobile, Yammer just make a lot of sense for enterprise collaboration. Today we only offer Yammer in English but we have noticed that there are an increasing number of new customers who are signing up outside of North America. In the near future we will be supporting multiple languages in addition to English.

Customers also like our value-based pricing model. We charge between $3 and $5 per seat per month, depending on the level of support and administrative tools. We also provide volume discounts for our larger customers. This is much more cost attractive than purchasing Chatter from Salesforce.com for $15 per seat, which is quite expensive and most employees don’t want to communicate through the company’s corporate CRM system. Our very fast viral Freemium approach appears to be working, because since we have been live for only the last 18 months we now have over 1 million seats today.

What do you see as the key trend emerging in the SaaS industry?

The first trend is the consumerization of enterprise software; Yammer is a great example of this trend. Real innovation in the technology space over the past 10 years has been on the consumer-side of the software market with products like Facebook and Twitter. At Yammer we want to take these learnings back into the enterprise software world. When I was at PayPal, we were very successful using the Freemium model to promote adoption. This type of approach to software can definitely result in the overall democratization of enterprise software. SaaS is the first step, when the delivery model changed, then there were no upfront costs and the risk is dramatically lower. Using techniques developed by consumer software firms, more and different kinds of buyers can now access enterprise-class software.

The second trend we see is that enterprise software products will be designed more for the end-user than power users or administrators. A good example is how Facebook and Twitter don’t do every possible feature or function and they don’t clutter the user’s screen. This simplified approach to software allow causal users to be more engaged with their products and other users. These types of causal use software products will also appeal to younger employees who have used Facebook and LinkedIn and expect their enterprise software products to be that easy to use.

Social Networking is also a major trend we are seeing. We started thinking about this over the last couple of years, since 2007. Now it seems so obvious, that social networking would grow into an unstoppable trend. The ability to connect workers, to leverage expertise and content all in real-time, which allows everyone to work smarter, just makes a lot of sense. I still think that there is confusion about Enterprise Social Networking, for instance Salesforce sees it as a CRM newsfeed, and we see it as enterprise real-time communication. Eventually we see Enterprise Social Networking replacing corporate email and instant messaging.

What is your outlook for 2010?

In January we raised $10M, led by Emergence, that  provided capital to allow us to expand our team. Our investors liked the fact that we have built a very cost effective business, based on our viral distribution model. Our Q1 sales were greater than all of our sales for last year combined.

The software industry is realizing that Enterprise Collaboration is going to be a huge space. Most software companies will want to get into this market because every company will want one of these collaboration platforms to deploy. The only problem is that most enterprise software firms looks at these types of tools backwards, because they already have multiple different product lines, then they will need to stuff it through their sales channel. At Yammer we have already solved this distribution channel problem and we can actually open up our channel to these companies as a Distribution as a Service model.

We continue to sign up a number of large customers, and this type of adoption makes other large companies comfortable using our technology. Things look great and our traction is accelerating.

Last week I participated in the annual Kenexa Analyst meeting in really hot Philadelphia. I had profiled Kenexa last year (July 2009) about their rebranding and active transition to SaaS, so this was a great opportunity to peak behind the curtain and see how they are doing.

Company Update

The last 18 months have been difficult for many software firms, especially those who are moving to a subscription based business model but Kenexa seems to have been doing well during this period:

• Revenue guidance for 2010 is between $162-169M
• 4,000+ customers, adding about 30 new logos per quarter
• Top 80 customers are spending about $1M+ per year
• The CAGR from 2003-10 has been 25%
• 65% of all recent deals have been multi-component deals
• The average Kenexa customer has 58K employees

Some new customers in 2010 include Accenture, Aetna, Facebook, Novo Nordisk, Saudi Aramco, SAP, Walmart (with 2M employees) and Whirlpool. Customers who bought additional products from Kenexa this year include Conagra, Deloitte, General Dynamics, Johnson & Johnson, Unilever and Volvo.

Even with this solid progress, Kenexa was still finding it hard to compete for mindshare against their two other SaaS talent management competitors SuccessFactors and Taleo. I was also told that Kenexa is also considered a very solid competitor in the Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) market, but my focus for this profile is on SaaS. Let’s take a quick look at this SaaS TM market basket:

• SuccessFactors (NASDAQ: SFSF). Shares in the last 12 months are up by more than 200%, with a market cap of $1.45B
• Taleo (NASDAQ: TLEO). Shares in the last 12 months are up by 30%, with a market cap of $950M
• Kenexa (NASDAQ: KNXA). Shares are flat over the last 12 months, with a market cap of $270M

The stock market currently values SuccessFactors more than 5X and Taleo more than 3.5X than Kenexa. Why is that? Because transitioning to SaaS is difficult, especially when you are a public company. But they are making progress.

SaaS Transition

Kenexa has done more than 20 acquisitions of both technology and services companies over their history. They have also purchased many overlapping technologies in recruiting (e.g. Webhire and BrassRing), which usually causes concern and confusion among customers. Unlike Taleo, who acquired Vurv, Kenexa is offering their customers business and product choices including transitioning to their latest products on the 2X platform as well as staying put. Rudy Karsan, Kenexa’s Chairman and CEO, even said for some customers who really want to stay on old, decommissioned products, his company will work out an arrangement to give the customers a copy of the source code and they can maintain their own products. Not the easiest solution but it shows that Kenexa is trying to work with their customers to help them be successful, which is unique among the leading talent management providers.

The company has been quietly working on building out their next generation integrated talent management platform, Kenexa 2X, for the last few years. This project included investing $40M in R&D, building out a new technology center in India and creating their next generation multi-tenant SaaS platform. This type of project is very difficult to successfully manage and similar next generation technology projects have sunk other companies like Authoria and SAP has invested almost $1B in Business ByDesign. All Kenexa 2X applications are SaaS-based and delivered out of their two data centers, one in North America and the other in Ireland.

We saw a brief demonstration of some of their new mobile capabilities on Kenexa 2X, but the real test is not with a room full of analysts but how well these new solutions are accepted in the market by customers and prospects.

As Rudy said during the meeting, he has felt like the last 10 quarters they have been walking through the desert but now they feel like they are coming out the other side.

For those of us on the outside, the technology is just one part of Kenexa’s business; they also offer a robust RPO service as well as a variety of assessment and analytical services for their customers.

Progress and Promise

As I just mentioned the major milestone for Kenexa is that their new 2X platform is generally available in the market. Like all big projects this platform transformation will take several years to rollout across their entire suite of technology products but they now have something to rally around. The 2X Recruit and 2X Onboarding products were launched in Q1 and the balance of the products will be rolled out over the next 24-36 months. Kenexa is following an Agile development process for their SaaS platform and applications which will allow for faster releases of products and capabilities.

Because this is a big initiative, I think it was really positive to see a roadmap prioritization of the products that were being transformed and launched. The product priority seems clear: recruiting, onboarding, training and development, succession, workforce planning, performance and compensation and learning. As they Kenexa progresses with the 2X transformation, we can expect to see small functional bundles as products are made available and then at some point out in the future, their full talent management suite.

There are some new platform capabilities that will add value to their traditional applications, including mobility. We were able to see the new mobile applications they are launching for the Blackberry and iPhone around recruiting, onboarding and performance management transactions. These mobile apps appeared to be simple to use and are based on basic approvals and routing, which make a lot of sense for busy managers and executives. The Kenexa 2X platform also supports complex workflows, like those required for their new onboarding application as well as support for 37 languages.

Kenexa also discussed the growing market opportunities for their recruiting and talent solutions outside of the US. In fact, their China business alone has grown by 4x in the last 5 quarters. They have also seen solid growth in the Middle East, Latin America and India. This strategy of focusing not only on the US but also new high growth markets should help Kenexa to continue to grow at a brisk pace.

The last area and possibly the most interesting has little to do with Kenexa’s technology products. Kenexa has several other service businesses, which are also growing including their RPO and Assessment practices. In the book ‘Crossing the Chasm’, one of Geoffrey Moore’s key tenants was for technology providers to listen to customer requirements and deliver a ‘whole product’ that doesn’t just consist of technology but contains services, integration, data, content and whatever else the customer needs to solve their business problems. The technology provider who can deliver a whole product solution can easily differentiate themselves from other providers and deliver more value to their customers, making their solutions ‘sticky’. If you need an example of delivering a whole product, look to Apple and the iPhone and iTunes.

Maybe by focusing on delivering complete, whole product solutions, Kenexa can become the Apple Computer of global recruiting and talent management.

Company:             EchoSign

Started:                 2003

Located:                Palo Alto, California

Geography:            Global

Market:                  Electronic Signature and Contract Management

Products:              EchoSign Web, EchoSign Salesforce, EchoSign for Google Apps, EchoSign for Netsuite, and EchoSign for Oracle CRM OnDemand

Key Customers: British Telecom, Comcast, Delta Airlines, GE Capital, Qualcomm, and Time Warner Cable

Website:                EchoSign

Blog:                     EchoBlog

Twitter:                 @fromechosign

Recent News:

EchoSign Electronic Signature Reaches 1,000 Customers on Salesforce.com’s AppExchange 2

EchoSign Launches its New App on Salesforce.com’s ChatterExchange, Accelerating the Market Shift to Cloud 2, the Next Cloud Computing Paradigm

EchoSign Integrates Its Electronic Signature Software with NetSuite’s Cloud Computing Platform

EchoSign Now Available Through the Google Apps Marketplace

I asked Jason Lemkin, EchoSign’s CEO and co-founder a few questions about his business and his view of the SaaS market in 2010.

Did you start out as a Software-as-a-Service company?

When we started our company in 2006 the market wasn’t that clear on what SaaS really meant. Our vision has always been clear to build a web or Cloud service where companies could execute a contract electronically on the Web.

This is my 4^th start-up and the second company that I have co-founded. I was a lawyer at the Venture Law Group here in the Bay Area and it was really obvious to me that this was the right way to get contracts done but lawyers tend to be slow to adopt new technologies.

It always seemed logical to be able to execute contracts electronically, because it saves time and headaches but our vision might have been a bit early. Our early customers were an odd mix of web-centric folks who read TechCrunch, use BaseCamp project management products, and other companies that wanted to automate their business contracting processes. Now we are seeing regular businesses are catching up to our early adopters by leveraging the Web for their contracting processes. We believe this might be one of the last open areas for the automating of business processes using the Internet. Like a lot of other paradigm changes contracts will be going from the analog world to digital, and most contracts in the next 5 years will all be executed electronically.

Why do your customers buy from EchoSign?

We have sold to nearly 20,000 customers of all sizes including Proctor & Gamble to Real Hip Hop Records to Dell and more than 80% of our customers use our products for sales oriented tasks. The real advantage for our customers is going from an older fax-based contract process to EchoSign. We can take a process that currently takes days and compress it down to just a few minutes; in fact we have found that the average time to execute a contract with EchoSign is less than 45 minutes.

Aetna likes EchoSign because healthcare professionals can complete contracts faster and more reliably and can reduce the expenses associated with faxing or mailing these agreements. The company has found that by using EchoSign, they can reduce contract-processing time from three weeks to one day on average. Currently about 70% of all of Aetna’s transactions with healthcare providers are electronic and EchoSign helps with these processes and provides visibility throughout the contract lifecycle.

We built EchoSign to be a very easy to use sales tool, not just a product for lawyers. All types of business people are executing contracts today. Business professionals and sales reps just don’t have time to learn how to use new tools; they just want to focus on closing contracts and getting back to their business.

Like Aetna, many of our larger customers also see the benefits of EchoSign for their legal organizations because we provide visibility into their overall contracting process, which helps with compliance by creating electronic audit trails, delivering a secure signing process, which can also help to avoid fraud.

What do you see as the key trend emerging in the SaaS industry?

When we started the company three years ago, customers were just buying SaaS point solutions like Salesforce.com and WebEx. Today companies are running their entire business using Cloud-based software. So the concept of signing and closing contracts can no longer be viewed as just a point solution, but a component of a larger, integrated business process.

For example, a typical integrated sales process for one of our customers might be capturing a new lead from Google Adwords, then demonstrating their product over the Web using WebEx and managing the sales process using Salesforce.com and then executing the new customer contract using EchoSign. Our customers would ideally like all of their SaaS tools and processes to be integrated because it saves them time and money. Applications should just be loosely connected together using API’s, they want these products to work together in a more integrated way.

Another trend we see is the rise of many different partner ecosystems that companies like ours will need to work with over time. EchoSign is a Salesforce AppExchange partner; in fact in 2009 we were the signal highest rated application on the AppExchange. We also work with Google Apps, Oracle, Salesforce, Box.net and others. We have these partnerships because our customers are looking to integrate all of these web products together to run their businesses and we want EchoSign to be a part of these expanding set of business processes.

Even though Salesforce has over 70,000 customers, the Laws of Attach Rates would tell us that we can only assume that 1-2% of their customers will consume our service. We just announced we have signed our 1,000^th Salesforce customer, so we are doing well but we need to work with many of these partners who support large eco-systems of customers. Because we are relatively easy to integrate into, we should have a higher attach rate to these solutions and this partner leverage will enable us to grow our business quickly.

What is your outlook for 2010?

Last year, during the recession, we saw elevated churn rates but now our business is back to pre-recession levels. The churn was related to bankruptcies and other similar types of recession fallout.

Our customer’s buying patterns are pretty consistent. Prior to the recession, we had many lower quality customers, but now we are seeing more stable, higher quality customers who are less likely to churn in the future.

These stronger companies are buying our solutions now, which is fueling the growth of our business and we are not seeing those lower quality customers out in the market. I guess it was easier to build a company when equity and debt were available to start a business. Today, strong companies are succeeding and accelerating out of the recession and EchoSign can help these companies optimize their sales processes.

A good sign for our business is that we are starting to see our customers asking to pre-pay for multi-year deals as a way to lock in future pricing.

The broader SaaS market (I would include PaaS and Cloud Computing) have been really interesting this year and here are some of the notable news items that have caught my attention over the past couple of months:

Mergers & Acqusitions

SuccessFactors buys CubeTree for $50M… Interesting move into the collaboration space

IBM buys CastIron … Nice compliment to their Cloud Infrastructure offerings.  Is Boomi next?

… then IBM buys CoreMetrics.

Salesforce.com buys JigSaw for $142M! … Surprised that they would pay up for a content company.

CA buys Nimsoft for $350M … gets into the SaaS infrastructure management market.  Good company.

SAP buys Sybase for $5.8B …  not sure about this one?  A diversion to deflect attention away from BBD?

RedPrairie buys SmartTurn … traditional SCM provider begins their move to SaaS.

VMWare looking at EngineYard … interesting since Amazon funded this Ruby-on-Rails PaaS startup.

Fundings & IPO’s

Marketing Automation: Marketo raises $10M Series D, led by Mayfield.

Enterprise Collaboration: Yammer raises $10M Series B, led by Emergence Capital.

Financial Analytics:  Host Analytics raises $15M Series C, led by Next World Capital.

Cloud Business Intelligence:  Cloud9 Analytics raises $8M Series C, led by Mayfield.

Recent SaaS/Cloud IPO’s include Convio, SPS Commerce and Financial Engines.

New Products and Launches

Broadvision launches Clearvale … Ning for the enterprise.

Plateau launches PaaS platform for Talent Management

Mercer partners with PeopleClick Authoria, first combination of HR consulting content with Talent Management technology platform

VMware and Force.com partner, launch VMForce.

Lawson launches ERP Cloud offering on Amazon AWS … too little, too late?

Recently Profiled SaaS Companies by Montclair Advisors

Birst, CentralDesktop, Cloud9 Analytics, GoodData, Marketo, Netsuite and WOLF Frameworks.

There are definitely a lot going on in the SaaS and Cloud Computing markets and we will continue to cover newsworthy events and profile leading players throughout 2010.

Company:             Wolf Frameworks

Started:                2006

Located:               Bangalore, India  and Herndon, Virginia

Geography:          Global

Market:                Cloud and Platform-as-a-Service

Products:            Wolf Frameworks PaaS

Key Customers: TRA, GMR, Wipro, Delhi Frieght Carriers, HLB Mann, eCounting, Head Start, Juice Junction, SEDS and eDok

Website:             Wolf Frameworks

Blog:                   Wolf PaaS Blog

Twitter:                @WolfPaaS

Recent News:

ARTIST - Learn2turn builds E-DoK on WOLF PaaS

I asked Sunny Ghosh, WOLF Frameworks, Director and CEO a few questions about his business and his view of the SaaS and PaaS market in 2010.

How did you get started?

We started WOLF in 2006 as a pure play Cloud Computing company about 4 years ago. My partner Ralph Vaz started the company and we have both been in the technology industry for more than 30 years collectively.

We have worked on building many exciting products such as Invensys Skelta, Ebbon-Dacs, DB Query, Digimaker CMS that are widely used in the United States, Europe and Scandinavia.

We have seen technology as a growing burden to a customer’s business. When the technology changes like when COBOL transitions to Pascal, then to .Net, then to the next big technology. But why couldn’t technology be separated from the business because it doesn’t make much sense to tightly render a technology specific assembly for customers, which cannot be changed without technical programming? If you could just keep technology complexity and business requirements separate, then technology could be democratized and be made available to all sizes of companies.

Since the Browser is now the focal point of all modern computing, this means this is the end of the operating system and PC-centric approach to applications. By simplifying technology and making easier to access and less expensive, there is a much larger customer base to build our new business on.

Why do customers buy from WOLF Frameworks?

We have three different types of customers that we sell through our partners:

• SaaS Startup’s who have a great idea and want to build a prototype. This type of customer will be a single user and spend a month to build out their concept.
• Professional Services companies that offers business of services and wants to develop a tool that eliminates services time and to create a new recurring revenue stream.
• Enterprises and ISV’s that are looking to create line-of-business applications, and mashups like GoToMeeting integration with their CRM system or corporate dashboard solutions.

At WOLF we offer a zero code Platform-as-a-Service offering. Since most of our customers and users are business analysts, we needed to make a product that was easy to use. WOLF Frameworks consists of a five layer of architecture including XML integration, billing, presentation, application development and database layers.

WOLF Frameworks offers a variety of capabilities that make it a rapid development environment like the following:

• Templates
• Reports
• API’s
• Multiple devices
• Built in storage
• Business rules and workflow engine
• Access rights
• Support for multiple databases

All of these capabilities allow customers to develop applications 70% faster than traditional approaches at half the cost. Customers have used different types of applications including accounting systems and also electronic patient record system.

We also use open standards like XML, AJAX for inter-operability and portability. WOLF also is based on leading technologies like .Net, MySQL, and SQLServer. Our platform also works with leading Infrastructure-as-a-Service providers like Amazon Web Services, Rackspace and a Canadian provider iWeb.

The WOLF platform can also operate in a hybrid environment that supports both Cloud and on-premise applications. In fact we can take a license of your OnDemand Cloud application into your Private Cloud whenever and since we use a single code base it is possible to sync-up hybrid environments.

One of the major reasons customers like to use our platform is because WOLF Frameworks offers minimal vendor lock-in. Applications developed with WOLF are portable since they built with XML. The data, application design and the hosting providers can be moved, with minimal effort.

What broad trends are you seeing in the SaaS/Cloud markets?

Obviously one major trend is the emergence of the Platform-as-a-Service solutions like WOLF. Our customers are looking for fast, cost-effective ways to develop new Cloud-based solutions to either replace older products or to build out totally new ideas.

There are many different PaaS solutions emerging;

• Application-led solutions from Netsuite and Salesforce;
• Application development-centric solutions like WOLF, Force.com or Intuit’s Quickbase
• Development-centric solutions built on LAMP, Ruby on Rails or Microsoft’s Azure and
• Community-centric platforms like Linkedin and Facebook.

The other trend Private Clouds. Our same customers are looking for ways to extend their existing solutions out to the Cloud but are concerned about security and Private Clouds offer a great alternative to on-premise software. WOLF also offers the ability to develop applications that can run in a hybrid mode, both on-premise or in a Private Cloud as well as out in the Public Cloud. You can also migrate existing web applications into WOLF’s multi-tenant platform rapidly.

What’s your outlook for the balance of 2010?

We are feeling good about our growth and have 10,000 users today and look forward to continuing a solid 2010.