Software as a Service (SaaS)

I recently caught up with Cary Platkin. Cary is an attorney and more specifically was the in house attorney assigned to the CRM On Demand  & SMB divisions I ran at Siebel Systems. Cary was instrumental in developing Siebel’s CRM On Demand Service Level Agreement (SLA) and helping me and my organization negotiate many Siebel CRM On Demand contracts. 

I really enjoyed working with Cary because he acted as a member of my management team; he first focused on the business objectives I wanted to accomplish and then applied law to help me accomplish those objectives. He also helped me negotiate through a minefield of sticky issues like Vendor Specific Objective Evidence (VSOE) for revenue recognition and managing SLA issues.

Cary now has his own legal practice, Platkin Law,  and one of his specialities is helping SaaS startups. I asked Cary if he wouldn’t mind addressing a number of common legal issues that SaaS companies are faced with and he was kind enough to oblige.

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Recently, I was interviewed by ReadWriteWeb about investing in enterprise applications. The following is a link to that interview.

Investing in Enterprise SaaS

In my last blog entry, I asserted there has been a dearth of start-ups in the enterprise software market for at least the last 5 years. According to VentureSource, from a high of 506 enterprise-oriented software start-ups securing a Seed or Series A round in 2000, only 201 new enterprise-oriented software start-ups were funded in 2008 and the vast majority of those used a SaaS, PaaS, or IaaS business model. Very few traditional model enterprise-oriented software companies were funded at all, the notable exception being in enterprise search and analytics.

As a result, large software companies whose innovation/growth strategy has relied upon a steady stream of start-up company candidates to acquire may be faced with a shortage in the not-so-distant future. Consequently, companies that have traditionally relied upon their strategic software providers to deliver innovative new solutions to enable them to further optimize back office and front office operations will suffer. 

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This is a follow on to my post on July 18th, 2008 titled “Does it Really Take $100M to Build a SaaS Business? Say it ain’t so, Joe!”. As part of some research I’ve been doing, I wanted to dig into the actual amount of capital it takes to make a successful SaaS company.

Wachovia Securities issued a report in May 2008 on the state of the SaaS market. On page 25, it shows amount of capital paid in prior to an IPO for 18 out of the 28 public SaaS companies. Here is that list below:

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Over the past year or so, PaaS – Platform as a Service - has emerged as a new and interesting strategy for Salesforce.com with Force.com and NetSuite with NS-BOS. The value proposition for developers is:

• Object-oriented development environment for rapid prototyping and application development.
• “Out-of-the-cloud’ integration with other applications developed on the platform
• No need to invest in commodity operational infrastructure such as “ping, power, and pipe” and disaster recovery services which can be expensive to set up yet completely non-differentiating.

So, if you’re a SaaS application developer or investor, what’s not to like?

Well, first let’s talk about the SaaS business model.

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Sarah Lacy, a reporter with BusinessWeek just issued this article about On Demand/SaaS businesses.

I had an opportunity to meet and get to know Sarah in 2004 because she did a long story about me and Siebel’s entrance into the OnDemand market.  I have a lot of respect for her and her opinion. However, I take issue with a few of the conclusions one might reach by simply reading this article and taking it at face value.

On Demand or SaaS isn’t a panacea, it’s a business model. Companies won’t succeed simply because they are SaaS-based. You still have to build a compelling application that solves a real business problem that people will really use and pay money for.  However, what the SaaS model has done is to give customers the ability to try a few seats and then “walk away” with relatively few sunk costs when a vendor fails to deliver real business value. Under the traditional enterprise model most customers needed months/years to do a pilot — which seldom gave them a complete picture - and once they committed they were committed forever because of the psychological and financial investment. So big projects like Oracle, PeopleSoft, Siebel, etc. rolled on even when it was clear that the customer wasn’t happy with the expense or the value.

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This is an excerpt from a recent interview I did with Advisor Garage – http://www.advisorgarage.com , a web community focused on helping entrepreneurs. I hope it gives you insight when you present to us, or any venture firm, to understand just what in the heck we are thinking as you’re presenting.

Venture Capitalist Gives Entrepreneurs Advice

Top Ten Questions:
1. Tell us about your Venture Capital Company.
InterWest Partners was established in 1979 and is a leading diversified venture capital firm currently investing InterWest IX, a $600 million fund. With more than $2B in capital under management, we take a long-term, collaborative approach to venture funding, providing early-stage and ongoing capital, management development and access to a broad network of resources.

InterWest is the lead investor in more than 70% of the investments we make, reflecting our ability to marshal resources and organize financings on behalf of our portfolio companies. We maintain relationships with our portfolio companies for an average of 5 years and in some cases for 10 years or more. An InterWest general partner serves as a director for 85% of the companies in our portfolio, often continuing to serve even after the partnership’s investment in the company has been returned.

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