Company: M-Factor
Started: 2004
Located: San Mateo, California
Geography: Global
Market: Predictive analytics for marketing and trade investment management

Products: M4 – Marketing Investment Management

T4 – Trade Spending Effectiveness

P4 – Portfolio Pricing Optimization

Key Customers: Coca-Cola, Kellogg’s, Alberto Culver, Ocean Spray, White Wave Foods, Wendy’s

Website: M-Factor

Recent News:

M-Factor Named “Cool Vendor” by Leading Analyst Firm

M-Factor Announces Global Partner Program called “M-power”

M-Factor Appoints Dirk Beyer as Chief Scientific Officer

M-Factor Announces Record Performance & Additional Funding

I asked Lawrence Whittle, M-Factor’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, the background to most of our early team is heavily influenced by On Demand / SaaS delivery. From the beginning it was clear that our target customers were looking for solutions that could offer advanced functionality, but with a lower risk, lower total cost and faster time to value than on-premise solutions would allow and importantly without any significant dependency on IT organizations. Customers want the continuous innovation that is typically only possible with a SaaS delivery model that allows ongoing seamless enhancements — an unthinkable proposition with traditional licensed software.

Why do your customers buy from M-Factor?

Our clients and prospects (primarily Consumer Product and Quick Serve Restaurant companies), have never faced a greater need for forward-looking, predictive solutions so they can optimize where and how to spend their marketing and trade dollars. Simple point in time analysis and backward-looking assessments are of limited value unless you can harness this insight to be forward-looking and enable you to positively change the future outcome of your business.

M-Factor’s solutions provide companies the ability to fully understand what happened in the past by breaking down sales to see the impact of various trade and marketing strategies this is then coupled with an even more important ability to look at constraint-based simulations to accurately predict what will happen in the future. Examples include what will happen if a company shifts advertising support from a brand or product or moves trade funds from one brand to another across channels and time.

M-Factor’s solutions can optimize marketing and trade spend up and down a product/market hierarchy so that aggregate views (such as at a national or regional level) are clear and companies can ultimately construct the best overall plan to meet corporate objectives.

The solutions being delivered as SaaS provides companies with the lower cost and faster time-to-value that they desire in today’s fast moving and highly competitive business environment

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

We are seeing interest in SaaS solutions growing significantly as companies want to take advantage of the comparatively low total cost of ownership and quicker returns of implementing SaaS technologies. This trend was already underway but the economic downturn seems to be driving more companies to evaluate SaaS solutions over the traditional on-premise applications. We expect this trend to continue for the foreseeable future. Any operational or security risks around SaaS have been eliminated, in fact the performance, scalability and uptime demands of SaaS have led to a superior level of customer service, way ahead of traditional software applications.

There also needs to be a continued focus on customer satisfaction and innovation from SaaS providers. Since companies more or less rent the software, SaaS providers must provide unparalleled customer support and product functionality to ensure that customers renew. We take great pride in how we address both with our customers and believe that both are required for SaaS companies to be successful.

What is your outlook for 2009?

In this down economy it may be a bit crass to say, but our 2009 outlook is quite positive. We offer a unique and compelling value proposition that is in high demand right now since our solutions can provide companies a holistic view of their marketing and trade spend. Our solutions provide the ability to dynamically plan across accounts, channels, and various time frames and can predict what will happen in the future through constraint-based models. In a downturn year for almost every company, across every sector, we have advanced our customer count, our revenues and our headcount

The proven referenceability of our customers has significantly fueled the overall market interest in our solutions. The lower cost of ownership, faster time to value and ongoing innovation that the SaaS model allows along with advanced functionally of M-Factor’s solutions are also key drivers behind our positive outlook.

Thank you to Lawrence Whittle and Jason Gatoff for contributing to this profile.