Kevin Dobbs

Owner and Managing Partner

Kevin is the founder of Montclair Advisors, a leading strategic advisory firms exclusively focused on assisting software companies with the business side of Software-as-a-Service. For the last 20 years Kevin has held executive positions with public and private software firms with operational responsibility for sales, marketing, business development, product and corporate strategy.

He is an Oracle alumni who started his technology career working for industry icons like Marc Benioff, Craig Conway, Terry Garnett, and Chris Greendale inside of various marketing functions including managing Oracle’s lead generation group that lead’s for Tom Siebel’s inside sales team.

Kevin has focused his career on how to use enterprise application software as a catalyst for transformational business change inside of all sizes of organizations. Some of his big ideas include launching the largest shared services financial application platform which IBM benchmarked at over 150,000 concurrent users, rolling out the first self-service human resources platform to the market, creating the largest employee portal for GM and DaimlerChrysler and launching the market’s first SaaS-based talent management suite platform and transitioning several software firms to SaaS.

One area of Kevin’s long-term interests has been delivering easy-to-use business applications over the Internet for all types of end users. Kevin has transitioned several firms to a SaaS business model, and based on his unique perspectives of the software market, it became clear that there was an interesting market opportunity. Although there was not only a need for a technology perspective when delivering SaaS, but there is an equally important aspect which are the best practices on how to run a successful SaaS business, which led Kevin to form Montclair Advisors.

Prior to Montclair Advisors, Kevin was SVP at Workstream, one of the early providers of SaaS-based Talent Management software. Kevin was responsible for company’s product strategy that included the development and launching of the industry’s first SaaS-based Talent Managements suite - TalentCenter™. Kevin also oversaw and integrated a number of Workstream’s acquisitions including Bravanta, HRSoft, ProAct Technologies and Exxceed.

Prior to Workstream, Kevin held senior management positions in the marketing, business development and product marketing at Kadiri, Workscape, Edify, Walker Interactive and Oracle Corporation.

Kevin is an active member of the SaaS and HCM communities, having spoken at many industry conferences, events, user groups, forums and seminars. Kevin has been cited in dozens of publications and is the primary author of the popular Smart SaaS blog, drawing thousands of readers per month covering leading firms such as Taleo, SuccessFactors and Workday as well as sector analysis of SMB financial services and office productivity tools.

Kevin is a graduate of the University of Oregon and resides in Oakland, California and can be reached at kevin@montclairadvisors.com .

Contributions

• Montclair Advisors Public SaaS Index
  This index tracks the publicly traded Software-as-a-Service companies that are on both the NASDAQ and NYSE. Using the PSI you can look across the spectrum of firms, see today’s stock prices, market caps and other business metrics.
• Article: Will Oracle Really Take Over the SaaS Market? - June 2009
  Kevin Dobbs gives an overview of the past, present, and future of Oracles achievements. After working at Oracle for almost five years he says that when Ellison sets his mind to something he usually gets it.
• Profiles: Montclair Advisors: SaaS Business Profiles
  Kevin Dobbs of Montclair Advisors profiles SaaS companies and talks to key members of their executive staffs.

  NetDocuments September 29, 2009	SpringCM September 8, 2009	OpSource September 1, 2009	Lithium Technologies August 25, 2009
  Daptiv August 18, 2009	CyberShift August 11, 2009	Jive Software August 4, 2009	iCIMS July 21, 2009
  Kenexa July 14, 2009	Xactly Corp July 7, 2009	InsideView June 15, 2009	Enwisen June 2, 2009
  MarketBright May 26, 2009	Sonoa Systems May 12, 2009	M-Factor May 5, 2009	RightNow April 13, 2009
  SuccessFactors April 7, 2009	Mint.com March 31, 2009	QuickArrow March 24, 2009	Workday March 17, 2009
  Bill.com March 10, 2009	Taleo March 3, 2009	Host Analytics February 24, 2009	eQuest February 17, 2009
  MrTed February 10, 2009	Zuora February 2, 2009

• Article: SaaS Sector Reports
  A new set of SaaS providers has emerged with products designed specifically for the small business owner. Many of these new software services are very low cost and some were even free, and because of this, the adoption of these products has been rapid. These Sector Reports cover the incumbent software providers and the promising new SaaS suppliers.
  SMB Office Productivity Software - March 2009
  SMB Financial Productivity Software - March 2009
• Article: Doing Everything to Lower Customer Acquisition Costs - April 2009
  Kevin discusses a conversation he had with Bill Soward, CEO, and Greg Schneider, VP of Marketing at Adaptive Planning. He talks about the company’s approach to building a SaaS sales pipeline in tough economic times.
• Article: Comparing Darwin’s Evolution and HCM SaaS Software - April 2009
  Based on what has been happening with the economy, the Human Capital Management software world is going to be forced to do a quick evolution.
• Article: Is Open-Source CRM Right for Your Company? - InsideCRM, March 2009
  You can save funds and boost functionality — but only if you’re technologically ready.
  As the economic downturn lingers, businesses are looking for ways to move forward without making huge investments. One idea is to use open-source CRM software to save the cost of a license fee. But just because you save the money on that part of the application doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s cost-free.
• Article: What are Venture Capitalists Saying About SaaS? - March 2009
  Kevin discusses what Venture Capital firms including Intel Capital, Emergence Capital Partners, ClossLink Capital, Hummer Winblad and Merrill Lynch are saying about the Software-as-a-Service market.
• Article: What Does Force.com Mean for Your Business? - InsideCRM, February 2009
  If you already use Salesforce.com, you may be a good candidate for the cloud Force.com is a cloud-based development environment for building and hosting online applications. For companies looking to build on top of the Salesforce.com platform, this could be an enticing opportunity to extend Salesforce to meet their needs or to develop whole new applications.