Little over 3 months ago I joined Talkdesk, a call center SaaS company as a COO. Talkdesk is an amazing success story: it got to $1M in ARR with almost no capital investment, 5 employees in Portugal, 1 CEO in San Diego and no sales people to speak of. Between its seed round in August […]
SAP, Oracle and Microsoft solutions will not go away anytime soon. While the SaaS discussion is gaining ground in the last months, we still don’t see massive (or even minor) conversion of enterprises from mission critical systems like SAP to SaaS based applications. Netsuite for example, is reported to go after SAP customers in a […]
No doubt that the financial crisis will hurt everyone. With a frozen financial system the entire idea of US capitalism (borrow cash, put it to work, grow to be profitable, invest again…) is on hold. Eric Schonfeld concluded today that VCs and Startups will not be immune to the crisis and I can not agree with […]
I had an enjoyable lunch meeting with a general partner in a leading Bay Area VC firm and during the discussion he wanted to compare notes on the way I evaluate a good SaaS company. I thought that my answer may be of general interest for employees or investors in the space- so here goes…
Yesterday I moderated a panel titled “Going 100% SaaS” during Office 2.0 conference. There is a full video so if you have 40 min to spare you can see it all. It was also covered in Ben Kepes blog. The panelist were 3 SaaS vendors (Dan Druker from Intacct, Rob Holl from Adaptive Planning and […]
Last week I wrote the first part of the Is SaaS for me post. It talked about two important distinctions of the SaaS model: It changes the power play between the customer and the vendor and assures that the vendors work for the customers every day. This part will cover some more distinctions like simplicity, […]
People write a lot about SaaS and focus on the famous “no-software” phrase that Marc Benioff coined. What many people fail to discuss is that the SaaS model, even if one ignores the products themselves, brings real value to customers and puts them in the driver’s seat for the first time. So for once, let’s […]
There is no doubt that SaaS and on demand are here to stay: if five years ago on demand solutions looked like an Internet version of the mainframe days (strong central server, no logic in the terminal, bad user interface… sound familiar?), the SaaS applications of today look appealing and offer a good alternative to […]
There is a new SaaS—“Something as a Service” every month. First came the term SaaS—Software as a Service. Marc Benioff coined PaaS—Platform as a Service. Amazon came along with HaaS– hardware as a Service, and Zoli brought the latest one: CaaS—Car as a Service, in response to Shai Agassi’s launch of better place project. If […]
I am a great believer in SaaS (Software as a service) as a future leading delivery mechanism for small and medium businesses (SMBs). Although SaaS penetration into this space is slow, there are many reasons for SaaS to prevail. It may take a while, and it will require a leap of faith from the customers […]
Gadi Shamia 