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Company: Host Analytics
Started: 2000
Located: Redwood City, California
Geography: North America
Market(s): Financial Budgeting and Planning
Products: Performance Management Suite
Key Customers: P&G, JPMorgan Chase, Thule and Pitney Bowes
Website: Host Analytics
Blog: Host Analytics Blog
Recent News:
Host Analytics Soars Into 2009 With Record Fourth Quarter Result
Host Analytics Continues Market Leadership in Manufacturing Companies
I asked Jon Kondo, Host Analytics Chief Executive Officer a few questions about his business and his view of the SaaS market in 2009.
Did you start out as a Software-as-a-Service company?
We started out as a founder and angel investor funded, on-demand service in 2000, that enabled our customers to run our innovative budgeting and planning solutions a hosted application. We launched our SaaS based service in 2005 and expanded our solution to include a comprehensive and integrated Corporate Performance Management suite. In 2008, we secured our first round of venture capital funding and introduced editions of our SaaS solution targeted to the needs of small to medium sized businesses, departmental enterprise users, public sector and non-profit organizations.
Why do your customers buy from Host Analytics?
Host Analytics helps organizations streamline the performance management process, align the planning process with business strategy and effectively measure performance and manage change. As a SaaS delivered solution, Host Analytics customers realize fast time to value through quick implementation of solutions, the highest levels of user adoption, effective empowerment of business users and a continuous flow of Host Analytics provided solution innovations and improvements. Businesses relying on error prone, complex and inefficient spreadsheets for budgeting and planning experience improved productivity and effectiveness by converting to Host Analytics’ integrated suite of corporate performance management solutions. Host Analytics’ “Excel in a Browser”, user interface style, minimizes the learning curve for finance, accounting and managerial professionals and helps to deliver fast time to value. Businesses with complex performance management requirements find Host Analytics solutions to be cost effective, easy to learn and fast to implement while delivering the required corporate performance management functionality when compared to legacy in-house and on-premise license based software solutions. Host Analytics is the only SaaS-based integrated Corporate Performance Management solution suite available for businesses of all sizes and industries.
What do you see as the key trend emerging in the SaaS industry?
The biggest story in SaaS is the impending impact of Cloud computing. The combination of SaaS based corporate performance management and Cloud computing will make “Plug and Plan” a reality. “Plug and Plan” budgeting and planning is an integrated approach to business planning. Data from multiple sources like ERP, HCM and CRM systems is quickly and transparently integrated into a Corporate Performance Management solution to extend and optimize budgeting, revenue planning, financial consolidation and score carding processes. This allows businesses to convert their planning from an annual or semi-annual event to a continuous process of timely and current adjustments.
What is your outlook for 2009?
We have a very positive outlook for Host Analytics in 2009. Today’s challenging economic conditions have created an environment where corporate performance management is more important than ever before. The current environment of non-stop significant economic news and events is driving businesses to reinvent their budgeting and planning processes by adopting new processes, methodologies and technology enabled solutions. We are seeing a significant increase in interest in SaaS based CPM and believe that 2009 will be an inflection point for SaaS, cloud computing and business planning solutions like CPM. Clearly, adoption of SaaS based CPM is increasing across a broad spectrum of businesses and industries.
Company: eQuest
Started: 1998
Located: San Ramon, California
Geography: Global
Market: Human Capital Management – Recruiting and Job Boards
Products: eQuest Job Posting Distribution
eQuest OFCCP Compliance Job Posting Package
eQuest P2 (Prophesy2)
eQuest P3 (Prophecy3)
Key Customers: Hewlett Packard, Johnson Controls, Starbuck’s, Liberty Mutual, Home Depot, AT&T
Website: eQuest
Recent News:
eQuest Extends Agreement with Taleo Business Edition to Provide Ongoing Global Job Posting Support
MrTed and eQuest Release Job Posting Delivery Services through SmartRecruiters
I asked John Malone, eQuest’s Chief Executive Officer a few questions about his business and his view of the SaaS market in 2009.
Did you start out as a Software-as-a-Service company?
Yes – actually, prior to it being called SaaS. eQuest’s technology and business models required this type of functionality to best integrate with the Applicant Tracking System (ATS) and ERP markets and to give customers increased flexibility.
Supporting daily job board data formatting changes is like shooting at hundreds of moving targets at once. SaaS was the only option for this type of business.
Why do your customers buy from eQuest?
We have a proven service that our ATS and ERP customers trust. With the present recession, budgets for hiring are naturally being reduced and companies want to make sure that their recruiting dollars are being spent at the most effective career sites. Our metrics and analytical software tools, like Prophesy 2 and 3 can make on-the-fly evaluations of the site’s effectiveness prior to posting a position.
Clearly companies find this a unique capability and an invaluable tool as part of their reason for using our services. In fact, we recently won the 2008 HR Executive’s Product of the Year award for Prophesy 3, our innovative job board evaluation tool, which is the first solution that allows a recruiter to follow a candidate all the way through the hiring process from posting the job, to their first view on a job board to the final hiring.
What do you see as the key trend emerging in the SaaS industry?
Simplicity as a Service (SaaS)
Most corporations are becoming increasingly frustrated with the long deployment cycles, high costs and complicated upgrade processes demanded by traditional software applications. These are common complaints about the large traditional software providers.
Software as a Service (SaaS) has become one of the fastest growing segments of the IT sector, because it provides customers with software solutions that can be implemented quickly, while avoiding the incremental infrastructure costs traditional with on-premise applications.
What is your outlook for 2009?
New opportunities in 2009 include global expansion - opening offices in Europe and Asia; continued feature enhancements to our existing technologies; and plans for introducing some exciting new products. We are expanding in new sub-sectors of the market and expanding customer base through new partnerships around the globe.
Thank you to John Malone for contributing to this profile.
Company: MrTed, Ltd
Started: 1999
Located: Across the globe with 10 offices – Headquarters in London, UK
Geography: Global presence, with strong experience in Europe
Market: Human Capital Management – Talent Acquisition / Recruiting Technology
Products: MrTedTalentLink™ - Enterprise Applicant Tracking System (ATS)
SmartRecruiters™ - Small and Medium Businesses (SMB) ATS
Key Customers: Siemens, Heineken, Levi Strauss & Co, TomTom, Tommy Hilfiger
Website: MrTed Website
SmartRecruiters Website
Blog: SmartRecruiters Blog
Recent News:
Leading European RPO Ochre House selects MrTed to support its European delivery model
MrTed releases latest version of flagship Talent Acquisition Solution
MrTed Taps eQuest to Provide Job Postings on SmartRecruiters
Ready, Set, Recruit! Talent Acquisition Leader MrTed Launches Free Applicant Tracking System
Free Applicant Tracking System Shakes Up Recruiting Software Market
I asked Jerome Ternynck, MrTed’s Chief Executive Officer a few questions about his business and his view of the SaaS market in 2009.
Did you start out as a Software-as-a-Service company?
Yes, we did. The company was started in 1999 to provide an ASP solution, yet our Applicant Tracking Software (ATS) has always been sold on a subscription-based model for our customers. After the launch of MrTed, we faced some interesting market developments and survived. We learned a lot from the dot-com crash in 2001 and we realized that that being a pure subscription business, or what is now being called Software-as-a-Service, is important for our company’s long term stability and growth.
Being a pure SaaS company during a recession provides more visibility into our future revenue streams and eliminates the up’s and downs we see traditional ATS competitors experiencing. We are now more than 20 quarters profitable and have strong recurring revenue; we are able to maintain our investments in our product roadmap.
Why do your customers buy from MrTed?
For the last ten years MrTed has been servicing the talent acquisition needs of large, complex, global organizations. Our customers are one of the largest companies in the world and we also provide the technology infrastructure for some of the largest Recruitment Process Outsourcers (RPO’s), who also service these types of complex, multi-national companies.
At MrTed, we understand global recruiting. With over 9 years experience we are able to capitalize our knowledge into our products and service delivery. Our enterprise product, MrTedTalentLink™, is a proven solution that is functionally rich but can be set up very quickly, which is attractive for our customers. We support the local regulations and languages of all countries in Europe and most of Asia and North America. Because of this, our clients don’t need to work with local software providers in country where they have a presence. All they have to do is work with us and we have them covered, one single solution for one global workforce. As recruiting in Germany is still not the same as recruiting in China, an enterprise needs to be flexible in its requirements. MrTedTalentLink™ is able to fulfill all the local requirements, but meanwhile maintaining the consistency on the highest level of the company. Because of our user-friendly configuration capabilities of MrTedTalentLink™ a company is able to set its own requirements and configure MrTedTalentLink™ on its own.
Our latest offering, SmartRecruiters – which is still in beta – is designed specifically for small business recruiters and hiring managers who, until now, have been forced to use expensive enterprise systems that are complicated and difficult to implement. By contrast, SmartRecruiters is easy to use, deploys in just a few minutes, and is 100% free. Integrated with the SmartRecruiters ATS is a set of pay-per-use services and vibrant and supported by a growing user community. After only 90 days, we have over 350 SMB clients who have signed up for SmartRecruiters! This Open SaaS product was designed to be free and easy to use, which is what SMB’s are looking for. We started our mission with the believe that SmartRecruiters can change the Recruiting Software industry and that SmartRecruiters has become the fastest-growing ATS in only three months is testament to the great need in the market for something new. We will continue to improve the application through input from the community and the addition of new services, and we are optimistic that SmartRecruiters will be the number one ATS in the industry by the end of the year.”
What do you see as the key trends emerging in the SaaS industry?
The urgency for enterprises to have one global platform and be able to adopt the local requirements, while maintaining the global consistency. If you don’t provide a single hosted and one code base solution to your customers, this will be difficult times for you.
With the launch of our SmartRecruiters Open SaaS offering for SMB’s we believe that free software is the wave of the future, especially when it comes to the SMB market. For many mature software categories, sales penetration into smaller organizations is costly and difficult. By adopting some of the business approaches of firms like Google, Yahoo!, Linkedin and Skype, if you can aggregate a large user community, there are many ways of monetizing the customer base without having to sell software.
Our approach to the ATS market is to use an Open SaaS approach, which is a mash-up of both Open Source and SaaS principals. Offer the software for free, its hosted and maintained but provide pay-per-use services and wrap it with a strong user community. We think that this trend has the potential to change the SaaS industry.
What is your outlook for 2009?
We continue to grow and see opportunities in the market on both enterprises as well for the SMB businesses.
In the enterprise market, it’s time to take control and grow from one global platform and get rid of the numerous local solutions. Customers want to consolidate on numerous local solutions into a single global solution, covering and managing their global workforce. We are ideally positioned for this 2nd buyers market. A couple of years ago this buyers group were the early adaptors of the first ATS wave, but now they understand the urgency of the current market to improve their processes, create a global workforce and be ready for the new phase of growth after the recession.
Introducing ATS technology for free to the SMB market turns the SmartRecruiters proposition into a gateway to the estimated $40 Billion staffing services spend by SMB’s in the US alone. Free ATS technology levels the playing field in the War for Talent and ensures that corporate recruiters and hiring managers in smaller businesses can be more competitive.
Although we will need to manage our business very carefully during this recessionary period, we also have new products and markets that we are now attacking, so we see continued growth potential. Unfortunately, we don’t control the current state of market or economy, but for our SmartRecruiters Open SaaS offering – which is Free & Easy – our timing couldn’t be better to launch a free recruiting tool and turn an industry upside down.
Thank you to Jerome Ternynck, Matthijs van Etten and Ralph Brasker for contributing to this profile.
Company: Zuora
Started: 2006
Located: Redwood Shores, California USA
Geography: North America
Market: Subscription Billing
Products: Z-billing: Complete billing solution for subscription businesses
Z-payments: Payment solution for subscription businesses
Z-Force: Billing and payment system fully integrated with salesforce.com
Z-Commerce Platform: Commerce platform for cloud developers
Key Customers: Boomi, Clickability and Marketo
Website: www.zuora.com
Blog: Z-blog
Recent News:
Zuora Introduces the Business Cloud With Launch of the Z-Commerce Platform
Zuora Enables Growth, Reduces Time to Invoice and Increases Productivity at Marketsync
I asked Gary Hagmueller, Zuora’s Chief Financial Officer a few questions about his business and his view of the SaaS market in 2009.
Why did you start your company?
Thanks to the power of the Internet and cloud computing, many products are moving to subscription services delivered online—everything from music and DVDs to software and infrastructure to groceries and cars.
However, companies that deliver these new services need a way to run their subscription business AND support their unique billing needs. For example, they need pricing flexibility to address different customer groups, operational scalability for growth, and key metrics like churn and monthly recurring revenue (MRR) to assess the health of the business.
That’s where Zuora comes in. Just as Amazon makes it easy to become an online retailer, Google makes it easy for anyone to advertise online, and PayPal makes it easy to accept online payments, Zuora’s vision is to make it easy for any company to build, manage and grow a subscription business.
Did Zuora start out as a Software-as-a-Service company?
Yes- Zuora was built from the ground up by SaaS industry visionaries and veterans from Salesforce.com, WebEx, Postini (now Google), and Oracle. The Zuora team grew up in the subscription services world and started Zuora with the mission in mind to help other SaaS companies build and grow. Moreover, Zuora runs its business completely in the cloud, using such applications as WebEx, eFax and Google.
Why do customers buy from Zuora?
Zuora is the fastest-growing on-demand subscription billing and payment service designed specifically for subscription companies. Its innovative products are able to meet a wide range of customer problems. Whether a company is having trouble processing recurring payments or spending too much time and resources of manual billing, Zuora’s team can understand and assess the issue. The Zuora platform changes the way subscription businesses manage and sell to customers and allows them to bring new products to market in less time, with less hassle.
What do you see as the key trend emerging in the SaaS industry?
In the current economic climate, an increasing number of companies will begin offering their products as subscription services. The success of the SaaS movement has even prompted other industries outside of software like cars and movies (i.e Zipcar and Netflix) to adopt this lucrative model of recurring revenue. The problem is…running a subscription business like salesforce.com or WebEx is hard no matter how the economy is doing, and mastering the metrics of a subscription business is even harder.
A key trend emerging is the Business Cloud, any easy way to add commerce capabilities such as subscription billing and recurring payments to the services that developers are building. More and more companies will be looking for a set of cloud-based services dedicated to giving them the tools they need to monetize the services that they are building on cloud platforms.
What is your outlook for 2009?
Our outlook for 2009 is extremely bright. The demand for our subscription billing and payment services are expected to grow, particularly in this economic environment, when businesses get lean and mean, regain focus on building differentiation in their core business, and divest non-core activities or outsource them to best of breed vendors like Zuora.
Thank you to Gary Hagmueller, Annette Giambroni and K.V. Rao for contributing to this profile.
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