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Company: InsideView
Started: 2005
Located: San Francisco, California
Geography: North America
Market: Sales 2.0
Products: SalesView
Key Customers: Ariba, Borland, IBM, Omniture, Serena Software, SuccessFactors and Synq.
Website: InsideView
Blog: InsideView Blog
Recent News:
INSIDEVIEW NAMED TO JMP SECURITIES’ HOT 100: BEST PRIVATELY HELD SOFTWARE COMPANIES LIST
INSIDEVIEW HARNESSES TWITTER TO POWER SALES
I asked Umberto Milletti, InsideView’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. Since the most complete and valuable business intelligence is available in the cloud, SaaS delivery has been built into our business model from day one. Also, since SaaS has become the delivery model of choice to our target audience – sales and marketing professionals - it was essential that we bring them the intelligence they need in their preferred model.
Why do your customers buy from InsideView?
Our customers come to us because they need to improve sales productivity and accelerate deal velocity. SalesView delivers just that: It maximizes sales team productivity by delivering a one-stop shop for prospecting needs and accelerates the sales cycle by enabling sales people to call the right prospects at the right time. And it does so by aggregating intelligence from thousands of sources, both traditional and social, to ensure accuracy, timeliness, and mostly importantly, relevance.
While having an efficient sales and marketing engine has always been essential, the economic downturn has pushed the need to “do more with less” to priority #1 for most sales organizations. That’s a big reason for the success we’ve enjoyed in the last two+ quarters – the brutal economic environment has actually accelerated the need for and adoption of Sales 2.0 technologies like SalesView.
What do you see as the key trend emerging in the SaaS industry?
With Cloud computing platforms becoming more mature, it’s becoming easier and easier to develop SaaS applications. That’s good news for customers, since as choices multiply, prices diminish. And with the base infrastructure in place, customers can focus on sales and marketing productivity applications, like ours, that sit on top of the Cloud and deliver relevant intelligence to the employee, at the right time and place.
SaaS and Cloud computing are allowing Enterprises to give their employees the same quality of applications and information that have become the norm for Internet users/consumers. Enterprise 2.0/3.0 is happening.
What is your outlook for 2009?
The tight economic environment will continue to force companies to focus on their core assets and competencies. Usually that means revenue generation and IP development. Anything that is not directly contributing to revenue or core company competencies is going to be under great budget pressure. Anything that drives efficiencies in revenue generation or IP development is going to get a lot of attention (we saw this earlier this decade with the explosion of technologies like web conferencing and SaaS).
Thank you to Umberto Milletti, Marc Perramond, Rand Schulman and Raksha Varma for contributing to this profile.
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