Category: SaaS

Everyone knows that hindsight is 20/20.  Back in 2003 when we were deciding whether or not to sell Expertcity (GoToMyPC and GoToMeeting) to Citrix or continue fighting the fight and attempt to take the company public 1 year later, it was quite a gut-wrenching decision.  Ultimately we decided that the risk/reward ratio to sell at that time was better than going for the public offering.  As it turns out, we all did quite well and it is great to see that a few years later that Expertcity (now known as Citrix Online) is continuing to drive the numbers that we believed we could do.  When most people think of the poster children of SAAS, they think of Salesforce.com, WebX, and RIghtNow.  As Phil Wainewright of ZDNet mentions in his blog, let’s not forget about the powerhouse that is now Citrix Online.  According to Phil Wainewright:

Acquired as Expertcity in February 2004, the Citrix Online division is an on-demand giant in its own right, with trailing twelve month (TTM) revenues of $121.6 million to June 30th this year. That makes it even bigger than the number 2 on-demand CRM vendor RightNow Technologies, which reported a TTM of $99.3 million for the same period, and more than a third the size of web conferencing leader WebEx, with a TTM of $343.7 million (for comparison, on-demand poster child salesforce.com posted $396.6 million TTM with its latest results).

Even more impressive is the fact that the company grew from $35mm in revenue from the end of 2003 to around $121mm in revenue 3 years later – not too shabby for an on-demand play going after the SMB market.  In addition, at the time of the sale, the company had raised around $30mm in financing but still had $16mm on the balance sheet when the transaction was completed.  So it is hard to argue that the SAAS model if done right can be capital efficient and offer tremendous growth opportunities.  In my mind, there are two ways to look at SAAS offerings – vertical market applications or horizontal plays.  Of course the challenge is that many vertical market app plays may not be big enough and the horizontal plays have probably been done already and are quite competitive.  All that being said, I am still quite interested in looking at companies offering a SAAS platform for Prosumers and SMBs.  If you have any of these types of companies that you want to show me, I am all ears.  I love the model and numbers like this show that the SMB market is really ready for these types of offerings.  As Brett Caine, head of Citrix Online says:

"Companies such as Citrix Online and salesforce.com and lots of others are starting to demonstrate in a very real way that companies of all sizes are able to use services to meet their needs in a cost-effective manner," Caine told me. "I think SMB has fully embraced the services model. There’s no doubt about that. Companies of all sizes have started to seriously embrace the software-as-a-service model."

I know I am preaching to the choir as none of this is new, but I must admit that the growth is pretty impressive.  As you know, SAAS will only get stronger as broadband penetration increases, as our wireless devices gain more processing power and better connectivity, and as the tools to access, share, and deliver timely data get even more powerful and easier to implement (think AJAX, enterprise mashups, lightweight integration with other apps, RSS for simple data delivery).

Going back to the earlier point on deciding to hold and go public or to sell at that time, with perfect information it is easy to conclude that we should have held on to the company and continued building it up.  However the decision is not that easy as there was lots of uncertainy at the time – we were only a two trick pony at the time and had not launched GoToMeeting and did not know how successful it would be, we did not have a sales channel to leverage like a Citrix, the IPO window was virtually shut for 2 years and we did not know when and how big you had to be for it to open (Google was one of the few Internet companies to go out in 2004), our growth rate was slowing while our subscriber churn was slowly increasing from just the remote access product, and the price was quite attractive.  Once again you can always question your decisions looking back with perfect knowledge but I can honestly say that everyone still feels that we chose the right path given what we knew in 2003.

The hype cycle for grid computing started many years ago, and today it is mostly relegated to uses in bioinformatics, financial services, and 3d modeling (think crash testing, oil discovery, etc.).  With yesterday’s announcement, Sun is making this grid infrastructure available to anyone, anytime, and on demand at Network.com.  As Jonathan Schwartz points out, consumer plays have been driving the surge behind massively scalable web services.  Think Google, Yahoo, eBay.  On the enterprise side think about any dozen of SaaS vendors like Salesforce, LivePerson and Rightnow.  Rather than building your own infrastructure, imagine being able to create your app or service and deploy it with no wires to pull, no datacenter or storage infrastructure to manage, and all with the frictionless use of a credit card or PayPal?  Pretty interesting thought?  I haven’t done the ROI analysis of $1 per CPU/hr (would love to see someone’s rough cut at this including operating overhead) but this certainly levels the playing field for scalable backends.  Imagine if you are a startup and can’t get VC funding but have a killer app to deploy.  Without any upfront capital expenditure, why not throw your service on the grid, pay per use, and build from there.  That is a big concept, if it works. I believe this is the beginning, the very early beginning, of on-demand utility computing.  With Microsoft moving behind software as a service, I see them deploying their own grid on their own stack on a rent per use basis.  IBM will too.  Competition will breed even better pricing and more opportunities for startups to focus on their apps and product and less about the back-end. I don’t see startups rushing to deploy their whole infrastructure on the Sun grid right away, but it certainly is worth looking at and monitoring over time.  What has changed from 10 years ago is that the focus is not on corporate computing (those guys still want their own grids) but as Jonathan so aptly points out, the long tail-the renegade departments who don’t want to wait, the many startups that have new web services, etc.  Ironically it was Sun that printed money from the VCs and startup community during the bubble-our checks went to a startup and they bought a Sun, Oracle, EMC backend.  Well today the open source wave has killed that business and maybe this is another take for Sun to get at this capital.  So how about that ROI analysis? 

Adam Bosworth has an interesting post on the evolution of software and why software delivered as a service will be the business model of the future. As you know, I have always been interested in this trend since my first post in October 2003 and since I invested in a number of companies in 1998 and 1999 like LivePerson and Expertcity (GoToMyPC) that subscribed to the ASP business model. What I have learned and what Adam points out is that it comes down to the customer experience, making a product easier to use for a customer and evolving it as quickly as possible to meet the customer’s needs. Software delivered as a service enables that and packaged software does not. In the time it takes Microsoft to deliver an application (went from 1 year to 5 years), a company delivering software as a service can deliver 60 iterations of its product. As Adam points out, “things that breed rapidly more quickly adopt through natural selection to a changing environment.” I have never thought about software in evolutionary terms, but it certainly makes sense.

From an evolutionary perspective, the ASP business model is quite interesting to examine. While every piece of software should not and will not be delivered as a service, it is also quite clear that customers are tired of buying expensive software products with large upfront licenses, expensive hardware to purchase, manange, and maintain, followed by expensive professional services to get the product up and running. From this backdrop, it is easy to see why reducing complexity and simplifying technology for customers is a big driver to more rapid adoption of products. It is also easy to see why reducing complexity for the customer also helps reduce complexity for the vendor, lowering the friction to sell and deliver its product. This means a more capital efficient business model, one which would hopefully scale much quicker and cost less to build product, sell, and support customers. For the vendor, it makes it:

1. Easier to sell
-shorter sales cycle-do not have to test extensively in a customer’s environment
-lends itself to telesales, can demo over phone and web, do not need a huge sales infrastructure to close deals (just need quota bearing reps without a huge staff of sales engineers and professional services guys to get the job done)
-not a capital expense, usually sold as monthly or annual subscription which can many times be taken out of business budget as opposed to IT budget

2. Easier to install
-no messy installation process, long testing process, or even waiting for hardware to be delivered to customer
-can leave a customer and simply point them to a URL, train them over the phone, and get them up and running
-all of this means that the business can scale rapidly

3. Cheaper to support
-browser-based delivery and richer client interfaces like DHTML make it easy to use for the customer=less training=less customer support costs

4. Easier to integrate
-standard APIs make it easier for software delivered as a service to integrate disparate systems
-once again, reduces costs to deliver product to customers and also removes obstacles to getting customers

5. Cheaper to build
-versus a few years ago, you now have much cheaper bandwidth, storage, servers, and software
-think Linux, Intel boxes, cheap bandwidth, commodity software stacks, and smarter entrepreneurs changing the economics of building and delivering software as a service.
-the economics speak for themselves

Given this, it seems to me that the ASP business model will only get more attractive with time. The ASP model makes it easier for vendors to sell and get customers up and running, lending itself to a more scalable and profitable business model. While I am not suggesting that every product will evolve this way, it is clear that simplicity rules. The ASP model is certainly one way of accomplishing simplicity. Appliances are another way. Packaged software with huge installation costs is not.

I have always been a big believer of the hosted software or ASP (application service provider) model since we made our first investment in LivePerson in January 1999. One of our main competitors of that era was Kana, which at that time, did way better than LivePerson in terms of customers, revenue, and market capitalization. I wrote a post months ago showing how far Kana had fallen, and how LivePerson stuck with its hosted software model and finally hit profitability. Back in those days, the sales people at LivePerson and Kana were not only fighting a product battle but also a religious war of enterprise licenses versus the hosted model. And back then, many large enterprise customers were not willing to have their data hosted with an early stage, private company. The world is changing. Recently Kana announced its new “on-demand” model jumping on the hosted software bandwagon. Comments from the Kana release sound familiar-Siebel and others are increasingly talking about an “on-demand” model and customer flexibility. RightNow Technologies is another company in the CRM space that is delivering an “on-demand” solution, filing for an IPO last month. So why is the hosted or ASP model coming back strong from its near death experience during the Internet boom?

First and foremost, without customers there is no business. Today’s customers are increasingly getting over data hosting concerns and are warming to the pricing and flexibility of subscription pricing and “on-demand” software. They are tired of the traditional enterprise license model, the lengthy implementation costs, paying for site licenses instead of on usage, and failed projects. Secondly, the cost side of the equation has changed dramatically. Hosted software vendors have learned from their erroneous ways and no longer need to build a data center for unlimited demand. Additionally, the pure costs of building a data center and using bandwidth have decreased significantly. Finally, the “on-demand” model is proven as a number of companies are already profitable-look at Salesforce.com, RightNow, and a couple from my portfolio, LivePerson and Expertcity (GoToMyPC).

Given these trends and the success of some of the companies above, it is clear that the new “on-demand” wave is just starting, and we will continue to see enterprise software companies like Kana move in this direction.

So I was at a New Year’s party recently and overheard a great grandmother and grandmother waxing poetically about the wonders of Net2phone and VOIP. Both of them happened to also have children/grandchildren living abroad and the cost savings from using VOIP is tremendous. While the penetration of VOIP is still quite modest compared to the traditional phone system, it really got me thinking that 2004 could be the breakout year for the technology. As the New Year brings about predictions, I have included some from Voxilla regarding VOIP.

I am also currently researching the use of VOIP for my office. My team is in the processs of moving from Greenwich, CT and back to NYC, and I have unfortunately been designated CTO for the transition. My first goal was to outsource as much as possible, particularly our phone service and email requirements. For a small office, it really makes no sense to build and maintain Microsoft Exchange onsite or to buy a huge PBX. Regarding VOIP, I found a number of interesting companies that only serve businesses and host the VOIP infrastructure in their own data center where all of the phone equipment, gateways, and interconnects would be located. VOIP equipment is more expensive than PBX so this way we could reduce the upfront capital cost of equipment by sharing it with a number of other customers. All we would have to do is get a direct T1 connection to their data center and buy some VOIP-enabled phones. On the messaging side, I came across a handful (not alot) of companies that offer hosted Microsoft Exchange for monthly service fees.

In general, most of the VOIP business service providers and the hosted Microsoft Exchange companies seemed to be pretty small players. What I did look for and did not find was a company that offered small and medium sized businesses an outsourced messaging platform for both VOIP and email (sounds like a big opportunity for me having just researched the build/buy decision for my office). It would be great to get all of my messaging handled through one vendor where all I really had to do was plug and play to get my office up and running. AT&T recently announced that they will offer VOIP, and rumors are that they will soon introduce a hosted Microsoft Exchange play. Trust me, I am not going to be running to AT&T any time soon for my business needs. If any of you know of reliable companies that offer both of the above services, please do let me know. Until then, my office will be one of many that take the plunge into the world of VOIP in 2004.

Siebel Buys UpShot, Motiva

If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em. On an earlier post, I commented on the return of the ASP model. It looks like Siebel is jumpstarting its efforts on the ASP side with its purchase of Upshot for $50mm + $20mm of earnout for 2003 and 2004. For an industry-changing hosted CRM play, that does not seem to be a hefty price. Let’s see what happens with Salesforce.com when and if it goes public next year. Word has it that Salesforce.com is expecting to do $100mm of revenue in 2003 while being profitable for the last 2 quarters.

Speaking of CRM, it is interesting to look at 2 other eCRM players, Kana, an enterprise vendor, and LivePerson, an ASP. At one point in time, Kana was worth $5b to LivePerson’s $300mm market cap. Today Kana is worth $105mm and LivePerson is at $135mm. The consensus analyst estimates have Kana losing ($0.54) this year and ($0.01) next year while LivePerson is forecasted to have EPS of $0.01 this year and $0.10 next year. It looks like profitability and operating leverage finally count. The luster of the ASP model seems to have returned to the public markets.