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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 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 4th 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 1,000th 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.
Company: Birst
Started: 2005
Located: San Francisco, California
Geography: Global
Market: On-demand Business Intelligence
Products: Business Intelligence Suite
Key Customers: Children’s Choice Learning Centers, Citrix, Key Technology, Rackspace Hosting, RBC Wealth Management, Securian, UE Vision and Metro Atlanta YMCA
Website: Birst
Blog: Birst Blog
Recent News:
Birst Delivers More Power to the Business User with Launch of Birst 4 Spring Release
I asked, Brad Peters, CEO of Birst 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?
I started Birst after leaving Siebel Systems, where I was running the Siebel Analytics products, that are now owned by Oracle. My team managed the analytics platform and applications for all business intelligence, which at the time was competing with MicroStrategy and BusinessObjects.
When Siebel was sold to Oracle, our division was the biggest business at Siebel and was growing fast while all other business lines were shrinking. What we were finding is that BI was better tuned for changing buyer preferences of better, faster cheaper than were our existing enterprise CRM products.
At Siebel, we saw value of analytics and SaaS and because of that, Birst was started as a real BI SaaS company. It was really hard to get to true SaaS since many of our initial customers were large financial services companies back in 2004, who wanted customized solutions. We figured out how to build and deploy products quickly but we didn’t want to build these giant, complex, customized products. SaaS was a great way for us to get back to basics.
What is interesting is that CRM problems are similar to BI business challenges. Business Intelligence is more dispersed than CRM with multiple data sources, scoreboards, dashboards, data transformation, and reporting. Because it is complex and data comes from many different places, that’s why many companies have often given up and just used Excel to solve these BI challenges.
We started the company in 2005 with the philosophy that BI is never going to be easy, but if we could solve the problem for large companies, then we could charge more for our solutions. Birst launched a simpler self-service version in 2008 which only took ¼ of the time and resources that it took to deploy traditional BI from firms like BusinessObjects or Cognos, but customers get the same functionality.
At about this same time, we discovered that other BI providers were cheating, by using a single-tenant, or a ‘fake SaaS’ approach, they would also cripple their product’s functionality or offer just a single table. This approach just frustrates customers. Birst can also access data wherever it lies, even if it is on-premise, in existing systems, which saves customers costs and cuts out huge chunks of deployment time.
Why do your customers buy from Birst?
SaaS BI is not just Excel on the Web; it is hard to develop and deploy true BI. Actually is easier to develop a CRM system. We also believe that delivering incremental and value-add BI capabilities is also difficult. BusinessObjects and Cognos have never launched a product on single platform, and often orphan older products.
The current SaaS BI market is not about ‘rip and replace’, our customers don’t want to do that because it has been expensive and painful to get to where they are today. More customers want to extend their existing BI investments. For traditional BI firms this is difficult because all of their product suites are an amalgamation of different products and companies they have purchased. We find that our target customer has spent a minimum of $250K rolling out an enterprise BI solution. If you can’t pay that amount, you do without and use Excel. A good example of this is one of our customers Metro Atlanta YMCA, who is using Cognos for finance but the marketing department wanted to use it too but didn’t have the resources, now they use Birst to extend Cognos, which is a great alternative.
Our products appeal to companies that have dispersed groups and are looking to pull data from many different sources and run centralized reports or create dashboards. Organizations like sales, finance and even supply chain appreciate the flexibility of Birst.
One lesson we learned was that the toolkit approach to BI or transforming BI into data applications doesn’t really work well for customers. At Siebel we sold sales and marketing analytics applications that came with hundreds of pre-packaged reports but our customers never used them because their data models were all different. In the end, one size doesn’t fit all, because you have to match the BI product to each customers business model. Birst delivers a set of templates for sales, finance, and supply chain that deliver 80% of the functionality required and this helps to reduce our implementation times dramatically. BI doesn’t fit easily into a box, your tools need to be flexible and deployment should just be personalizing the last 20% of the solution.
Birst sells to both IT and Line of Business executives who are frustrated getting access to important business information and IT is constrained and they want to get the BI monkey off their back without sinking their organization.
What do you see as the key trend emerging in the SaaS industry?
I think the major trend we are seeing is that SaaS is migrating to mainstream acceptability. People didn’t even know that SaaS existed five years ago and at that time was still an early adopter market. Salesforce.com has done a great job evangelizing the SaaS business model as well as convincing customers that Cloud Computing and SaaS are more secure than customers may have thought. Today we don’t have to do a lot of basic SaaS education because the market is well along the maturity curve.
The other major trend is industry consolidation of the major BI vendors into mega suites. This high degree of consolidation is resulting in a feeling of vendor lock-in, which is disenfranchising customers because there are fewer pure play BI alternatives.
What is your outlook for 2010?
We have been working hard on launching Birst 4, which is a huge leap forward in our plans to bring a full SaaS BI solution to market. During 2009 we continued to build out our company, to be ready to go to market this year. We also announced big partnerships with Salesforce.com, RightNow, OEM partners and 30 system integrator partners.
I find it hard to correlate our business success to the outside economic conditions. We get the sense that the economy is loosening up but our future is going to be more determined by how well we execute on our business in 2010 and beyond.
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