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Company: Lithium Technologies
Started: 1997
Located: Emeryville, California
Geography: Global
Market: On-demand Social CRM
Products: Lithium Social CRM
Key Customers: AT&T, Future Shop, Lenovo, PitneyBowes, Barnes & Noble, Best Buy and Verizon
Website: Lithium
Blog: Lithosphere Blog
Twitter: @LithiumTech
Recent News:
Lithium Achieves 80 Percent Revenue Growth in First Half of 2009
Crucial.com Enhances Customer Experience with Online Community
Lithium Ushers in the Next Generation of Customer Relationships with Social CRM
Future Shop Recognized As Customer Leader by 1-to-1 Magazine
I asked Sanjay Dholakia, Lithium’s Chief Marketing 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, or at least an on-line business. The company was started in 1997, and was a spin out of Gamers.com a leading on-line gaming site. Because there was a lot of IP around how to manage the social dynamic related to on-line communities, the founders decided to apply this technology to help enterprises better manage their customer forums and networks. The Gamers.com experience was helpful because the founders had learned how to manage very large on-line gaming communities.
Why do your customers buy from Lithium?
Our customers come from a lot of different point products like forums and various types of social media and in-house solutions. These companies are looking for a better way to leverage their customer relationships to build vibrant customer networks, what we are calling Social CRM. Some social networking platforms are internal collaboration tools or platforms, others are consumer social networking solutions, but Lithium’s Social CRM platform is focused primarily on that outbound relationship with the customer.
The three major reasons a customer buys from Lithium are related to innovation, promotion and support.
Our customers use the Lithium solution to innovate around new product ideas, as well as solicit ideas and feedback from their customers. A good example of this is iRobot, a robotics firm that makes a variety of clever home accessories. Many of their customers have actually developed a pet affinity with their in-home robots and based on customer feedback from their Lithium customer community, iRobot developed personalized robots which has generated millions in incremental revenue from just that one community-based idea.
When it comes to promotions, our customer myFICO, the credit score company, has used the Lithium platform to build out their customer network. Because the company is highly regulated, they are prohibited from marketing their products to consumers but their customer network does the marketing for them. They have found that FICO Forum members, of which there are 850,000 members, usually spend 40% more than those customers who are not members, demonstrating the power of their network.
Support is a clear benefit of creating a vibrant customer network, because it shifts costs to a free channel where customers can support each other. Cisco’s Linksys division has been able to quantify up to $10M per year in savings by leveraging the Lithium Social CRM platform for their Linksys Forum. Sage Software has also found that their customers view the company as more responsive and have seen improvement in their Net Promoter Scores as they have rolled out customer support forums, like this one for their SalesLogix product.
What do you see as the key trend emerging in the SaaS industry?
There is an emerging opportunity to create new information products based on all the data that many SaaS companies have access to. So by applying their own best practices and proprietary algorithms, many companies are devising very valuable analytic-based products that expose information that enables enterprises to more efficiently manage organizations as well as to create new revenue streams.
Lithium wants to start building benchmarks and best practices that provide actionable industry information for our customers and show them how to better leverage their customer relationships.
What is your outlook for 2009?
We just put out a press release announcing that we had 80% growth in our recurring monthly revenues during the first half of 2009, which is impressive in this economic climate. During the first half we also welcomed new customers like Aflac, Trend Micro, Betfair, France Telecom, Avnet and Leapfrog Enterprises.
During the first half of the year we have also opened new offices in Zurich and London as well as hiring a new general manager for EMEA. The company has decided to invest into the despite the downturn and take market share. Overall we are feeling cautiously optimistic for the balance of 2009 and heading into 2010.
Thank you to Sanjay Dholakia and Raksha Varma for contributing to this profile.
Company: Daptiv
Started: 1997
Located: Seattle, Washington
Geography: Global
Market: On-demand Collaborative Business Software
Products: Daptiv PPM, Daptiv Scrum, Daptive SMB and Daptiv Platform
Key Customers: BP, Chase Paymentech, Frontier Airlines, Honeywell and UCSD.
Website: Daptiv
Blog: Daptiv Community
Recent News:
SaaS Model Sees Growing Demand Overseas
Daptiv Brings Kevin Hickey on Board as Chairman of the Board of Directors
Daptiv Adds More Than 30 New Customers and New Solution for Software Development in Q2 2009
Daptiv Named a Winner of a ‘Project & Portfolio Management Innovation Award’
I asked Tim Low, Daptiv’s VP of Marketing 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 in 1997 as an on-demand project portfolio management firm. Over the last ten years Daptiv has evolved into a leading firm in the Collaborative Business Software market. Project Portfolio software helps companies to more effectively manage new product development to operations and service delivery, Daptiv’s on-demand solutions streamline employees’ day-to-day interaction and collaboration while dramatically reducing the complexity of managing multiple teams, projects and tasks.
Daptiv developed what they are calling a mid-office set of solutions that sit between traditional back-office solutions like SAP and ERP products and front-office solutions like Salesforce.com and other CRM Today, Daptiv has more than 700 customers with over 100,000 users.
Why do your customers buy from Daptiv?
Daptiv offers a wide variety of products. Our Dapitv PPM solution is ideally suited for mid-market firms with revenues between $50M - $2B in annual revenues. Daptiv PPM is attractive for vertical markets such as financial services – specifically for insurance, consumer packaged goods and higher education. Our Daptiv SMB offering was designed for small companies with 10-25 users. Daptiv SMB provides a pre-configured solution at a lower price point. Daptiv Scrum is for large firms who are developing complex applications for SAP, Oracle, Salesforce and Microsoft. The product offers over 150 pre-configured connectors, to make integration more straightforward.
Customers also like the fact that Daptiv takes about 28 days on average to implement, which provides rapid time-to-value. This ‘Subscribe-to-Live’ approach encompasses all the time associated with product provisioning, configuration and training.
Daptiv also offers an interactive user community that contains blogs, forums with best practice advice and a complete solutions library. This customer community is very useful and provides a way for Daptiv customers to connect with other users.
Lastly customers like the flexibility of the products because they are configurable and provide dashboards, custom fields and views. The Daptiv applications are easily extendable using the company’s dynamic data model.
What do you see as the key trend emerging in the SaaS industry?
As I mentioned, organizations value the time it takes to access as well as how long it takes to pay off their investment, which is why our Subscribe to Live packages are so popular.
We are also seeing a broader adoption of PPM solutions in the market as companies are looking for tools that help them better manage their organizations, especially as they try and do more with less resources.
At Daptiv we believe the maturity of the On-demand delivery model is a major trend. As more customers are deploying software on-demand they are realizing the importance of solutions that have thought through issues like security, controls and integration.
What is your outlook for 2009?
This has been a challenging year but we are seeing a strong demand globally for our solutions, in fact, more than 40% of our deals in 2009 coming from outside the United States. We have seen a lot of demand for our products in Europe, Latin America, Australia and New Zealand. More than 20 percent of Daptiv’s overall customer base is headquartered internationally, a growing percentage, as nearly 50 percent of Daptiv’s second quarter new customers are based overseas. International customers like our affordable, flexible licensing model as a primary advantage of the SaaS model, as well as ease of use and configurability for managing the various types of work and projects throughout their organizations.
We have seen a lot of pent up demand in the first half of the year. It is early but we are seeing some good signs and look forward to a strong second half of the year.
Thank you to Tim Low and Zoe Vandeveer for contributing to this profile.
Company: CyberShift
Started: 1996
Located: Parsippany, New Jersey
Geography: Global
Market: Workforce Management
Products: Workforce Management and Expense Management
Key Customers: Allianz, BASF, Hitachi and Sunoco
Website: CyberShift
Recent News:
CyberShift CEO Named as Finalist for Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award
I asked Robert Farina, CyberShift’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?
No, actually we started out in 1996 as a pure on-premise software company. About five years ago we decided to shift our model from a perpetual software company to a subscription software business. In fact, when we started the move we were about 10% recurring revenues and today we are our new sales is about 70% of total revenues, which is a major change.
CyberShift’s workforce and expense management solutions enable our clients to dramatically enhance their ability to proactively manage and control the two largest variable costs for most businesses: people and employee expenses. As an organization we are dedicated to providing in-depth and high quality services to our client to solve our clients’ workforce challenges and to continuously improve our own operations and processes to be an outstanding long-term business partner. The good news is that our solutions provide real ROI for our clients and SaaS just allows us to build on those advantages. In fact, more than 70% of all of our new sales are SaaS.
Why do your customers buy from CyberShift?
Our clients like Cybershift for many reasons including the fact that we are a long time industry leader, having been in business for 13 years. We currently have over 600 customers using our Workforce and Expense Management solutions. Where CyberShift really differentiates ourselves is our ability to manage complex client needs for companies like 3M, Convergys, BASF, Sunoco and CBS Entertainment. These large organizations have distributed workforces, with multiple languages and changing requirements
Cybershift offers a proven technology platform that can support companies with less than 100 employees to organizations with more than 250,000 employees. We also offer a flexible deployment options for our clients, which they find valuable. Our SaaS platform is robust and designed to support large, complex and global organizations. Our data center is SAS70 Type II certified and we have also passed CICA 5970 and PCI III certifications. Today we have employees in 27 countries accessing CyberShift solutions.
Because we have been in business a long time, it gives our clients confidence in the company and we have experienced solid growth rates in excess of 35% as well as strong adoption of our on-demand offerings. CyberShift also receives a lot of industry awards which also provides us with credibility for both our existing clients and companies who might be looking for Workforce Management solutions.
We also partner with firms that resell our products along side their offerings, that create a nice packaged solution for our joint clients. Ceridian offers our scheduling, time and attendance and expense management solutions to their clients. Mastercard partners with us to resell our travel and expense solutions. This allows our joint clients to purchase a complete solution from a single supplier.
What do you see as the key trend emerging in the SaaS industry?
For our area of the SaaS market, we see a large opportunity to sell our solutions into the small and medium business segment. These firms were harder to reach and SaaS allows us to more cost-effectively deliver Time and Attendance and Expense Management solutions.
We also believe that channels like Ceridian and Mastercard are important and will continue to help firms like CyberShift sell our SaaS products more efficiently than doing it just through a direct sales approach.
Another trend is organizations outside of the US looking for Workforce Management solutions. There has been some fairly significant interest in our products in Europe and we are in fact doing a pilot for Nokia, which we are watching closely.
What is your outlook for 2009?
For many companies this year has been difficult and we have noticed a slow down at the beginning of the year but because our solutions have a real ROI, it hasn’t hit us as hard as the overall industry. There has been a lot more caution during the procurement process but we are still getting deals done. So far in 2009 we have sold a good number of deals but we have just seen clients taking smaller steps first, including a lot more pilots of our products.
Thank you to Bob Farina and Jeanne Achille for contributing to this profile.
Company: Jive Software
Started: 2001
Located: Portland, Oregon
Geography: Global
Market: Social Business Software
Products: Jive SBS, Jive Express
Key Customers: Intel, Nike, VMware, NetApp, SAP, ManTech, Embarq, and National Instruments
Website: Jive Website
Blog: Jive Blog
Recent News:
Jive Software Recognizes its Largest Sales Quarter Ever in Q2 2009
Jive Signs Agreement with SAP to Deliver Social Business Intelligence for the Enterprise
I asked Matt Tucker, one of Jive Software’s founders and Chief Technology 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?
No, actually we started about 8 years ago providing community and social software as a hybrid business, offering both on-premise and hosted solutions. Our initial products were low-cost discussion forum software.
We initially bootstrapped the company in Manhattan and it became too expensive for us and we felt that being a technology company, we needed to be on the West Coast. Our first thought was the Bay Area but it was still too expensive and we had concerns about hiring engineering talent in other West Coast cities. Finally we decided on Portland, Oregon. After the move to Portland, we rebooted the company from an operational perspective.
In 2004, we launched our new software suite based on our customer’s feedback and market changes centered around Web 2.0. Later we added in Wiki’s, blogging software, and released Clear Space 1.0 2007, which was the market’s first complete suite approach to Social business software. Our suite was true enterprise-grade software and it supported large communities.
Then about three years ago we launched our SaaS offering and recently launched our newest product suite focused exclusively on Social Business Software — Jive SBS.
Why do your customers buy from Jive?
We feel Jive SBS is the leading product in our market from a feature and function perspective. Other firms in the social software space like, IBM Lotus, and Microsoft SharePoint, offer solutions but they are not as functionally complete as Jive SBS. There are also consumer-oriented sites like Facebook but they are not enterprise-ready solutions and large customers get very nervous allowing employees to publish sensitive information where the public has access to it.
Jive Software is enterprise software, which means it needs to be really secure. Our products are so secure, that even the US Intelligence Community uses them. Compliance and security questions are common when it comes to building external communities. We find that being SAS70 Type II is helpful but is IT not ready for critical corporate data to be hosted externally in SaaS or the Cloud.
Many of our customers will use Jive to create external communities to sell and market their products and services. They like the fact that they don’t need to work with IT to get started or to maintain their communities. We definitely have some early adopters now like – Apple, Nike and CNN, but we think it might 2 or more years for social collaboration software to be widely accepted as a SaaS or Cloud solution. Keep in mind that corporate-wide communications and collaborations are more sensitive, because most companies don’t want their proprietary intellectual property freely available out on the Internet.
Jive Software enables companies need to effectively manage this valuable Social Capital, which is just like intellectual capital. Think of it as a combination of institutional knowledge and a company’s culture. Being able to manage a company’s Social Capital is increasingly important today with companies being global, with teams everywhere, less business travel and their corporate cultures that revolve around email.
What do you see as the key trend emerging in the SaaS industry?
Cloud Computing is the major trend for our market.
Jive is definitely moving towards Cloud Computing and in fact, I blogged about this topic a few months ago when we launched Jive Express, our new Cloud-based offering. We are leveraging Amazon’s EC2 infrastructure, which allows our customers to get up and running quickly – they can put up a community instance in about 4 minutes. It’s self sign-up and the security is the same as enjoyed by our SBS enterprise customers.
We think this approach to Social Business communities is cool because customers can solve very specific problems quickly, then other groups inside their enterprise get to see the product in action and then it can spread virally. Customers can try using our Cloud-based offering free for three months and then it converts over to $3/user/month subscription. We are hoping that most of these Jive Express customers will grow their instance, which should generate lots of new leads and pilots for us.
We are approaching the Cloud a little differently than those who are offering a pure multi-tenant model, because we are leveraging virtualization and more of a single tenant model, which delivers many of the benefits and a similar price point as multi-tenant.
We are now using virtualization as the backbone for our SaaS offerings and leveraging Amazon’s AWS infrastructure, so we can now manage our Jive Express Cloud as one large instance.
What is your outlook for 2009?
Jive continues to celebrate after every quarter because we keep exceeding their numbers. We believe we are in a very solid market space and Social Business Software is a critical and strategic priority for more and more companies. Because companies want to do more with less, they will continue to leverage enterprise technology like ours.
We are cautiously optimistic and building a business continues to be a lot of hard work but things seem to be going our way.
Thank you to Matt Tucker and Mike Marfise for contributing to this profile.
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