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Interview with New Member: LiquidPlanner

December 12, 2012 By

SIIA is delighted to welcome new member LiquidPlanner. I had a chance to speak with their CEO, Liz Pearce, to learn more about the company and the project management market.

Rhianna: Welcome to SIIA! Tell me a little about LiquidPlanner and what makes you unique in the Project Management market.

Liz: LiquidPlanner is unique because it is the only project management software to offer a bold new approach to scheduling. We call it “priority-based scheduling,” and it’s not only easier, but also far more accurate than traditional project management solutions based on the Gantt chart. Our robust scheduling engine actually automates much of the manual work that traditionally falls to project managers. In fact, our customers report their teams save an average of 16 hours a month from the automation benefits provided by LiquidPlanner.

Here’s how it works. In LiquidPlanner, you give tasks “best case / worst case” estimates and put them in priority order. Then LiquidPlanner automatically calculates for you an expected completion date for each task and for the project as a whole, based on who the work is assigned to and how much availability they have. Unlike other project management solutions, LiquidPlanner does not allow you to overbook a team member, so the results are based on real world availability of resources. Because projects and tasks are prioritized in rank order, you can instantly see when a change to one project impacts another – something that is impossible with most other tools.

LiquidPlanner also offers time tracking, collaboration, analytics, mobile apps, and more, all delivered through the cloud. We launched the company in 2008 and have over 1,200 customers in 50+ countries worldwide, many of whom are software, IT, and creative organizations.

Rhianna: How do you think the Project Management space has evolved in the last 3-5 years and what trends are driving that evolution?

Liz: The general proliferation of SaaS-based business tools has been transformative for the project management industry. Shared, collaborative systems are now the norm, in contrast to the time just a few years ago when the project manager alone held the keys to the castle. It’s resulting in a new “democratization of project data,” where information on workload, estimation accuracy, and tracking is now available to all members of the team. That means team members can get a barometric read on their own performance relative to others, not to mention better insight into their own contributions, areas for improvement, and roadmap of responsibility. Now, the onus is on vendors to provide solutions that are easier to use, so each team member themselves can update the project workspace without the need for a specialized project manager in the IT department. The trend of SaaS-based project management also means executives are getting unprecedented visibility into capacity and their ability to deliver products and services. I think you’ll see more and more businesses reporting internal cost savings from smarter project management tools.

Rhianna: You do a lot to ensure security and support with your solution. Can you tell us a little about the measure you take to ensure overall security and support of your solutions?

Liz: One of the great things about the SaaS model is that software providers live and die by the quality of service they offer. Naturally, we go to great lengths to ensure end-to-end security and reliability, from authenticating every user account via email to using SSL technology for server authentication and data encryption. We manage our own servers at a world-class data center here in Seattle. In addition to tight physical security measures, it’s architected to protect against hardware and software failure with redundant power and internet connections, hot failover servers, nightly off-site data backups, and 24/7/365 monitoring.

Rhianna: You recently took over the CEO position, having previously held the COO role at LiquidPlanner. What is your vision for the future of the company?

Liz: It’s an incredibly exciting time at LiquidPlanner. We’re really entering the second era of LiquidPlanner’s life as a company. The first five years were dedicated to R&D – we set out to tackle a really big, hard problem and disrupt an old and stagnant market. During this period, we essentially bootstrapped the company to profitability and established a loyal customer base around the world. Today, LiquidPlanner has more than 1,100 paying customers in 50 countries across multiple industries and the company was named one of “Washington’s Best WorkPlaces” by the Puget Sound Business Journal. The next phase for LiquidPlanner is all about driving the company’s growth and extending our platform. We see so many opportunities to help teams tackle increasingly complex projects in today’s competitive business environment, and we are investing heavily in social productivity innovation to meet this growing demand. My vision is that LiquidPlanner becomes a component of the must-have business software toolkit for businesses of all sizes, alongside industry leaders like Salesforce, Zendesk, and Box. We’re lucky to be doing business in a time when innovation, quality, and service are rewarded – on those grounds we are very solid. I’m extremely bullish on the future.

 

Rhianna Collier is VP for the Software Division at SIIA.

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Filed Under: Cloud Computing, Software, Uncategorized Tagged With: , ,

New Report: Private Software Firms See Strongest Revenue Growth Since Recession Began, Expect Big Job Gains

December 12, 2012 By

SIIA today announced the results of the 2012 Software Benchmarking Industry Report, which finds that private software companies are experiencing the largest revenue growth since 2008 and expect strong job growth. The report – which was developed by SIIA partner OPEXEngine, the leading aggregator of financial and operating benchmarks for small and mid-sized software companies – surveyed private and public U.S. firms with up to $350 million in revenues.

The 2012 Report identifies significant revenue growth rates, strong job creation and high expectations. According to the report, participating private software firms achieved an average revenue growth rate of 37 percent in 2011 – 10 percent beyond the growth rate achieved in 2010 – and they anticipate further gains in 2012. Importantly, companies say they plan to increase employee headcount in 2012 by an average of 27 percent – the highest hiring expectation since the recession.

The small and mid-sized software industry in the U.S. is seeing strong growth and contributing to the economy in ways we haven’t seen since before the recession. With signs of more hiring and greater optimism, the 2012 report signals an exciting turning point in this industry’s efforts to weather the economic storm.  While our past reports have shown steady profitability, the 2012 study clearly demonstrates that job creation is catching up with revenue growth. Companies are hiring again and moving away from the cost-containment strategies they have favored since 2008. This segment of the American economy has not only weathered the recession – it has emerged as a key job creator and an engine for recovery.

The 2012 Software Benchmarking Industry Report also found that despite generally more conservative fiscal management, East Coast companies are currently investing for better revenue growth and job creation in 2012 to catch up to  their West Coast counterparts. This is the first year that OPEXEngine has compared East and West Coast firms.

Key findings from the 2012 Software Benchmarking Industry Report include:

  • Private firms expect to increase headcount by an average of 27 percent. Firms with revenue under  $10 million and between $10 and $20 million anticipate the biggest hiring gains at 38 percent and 36.5 percent, respectively.
  • Private software firms achieved an average revenue growth rate of 37 percent in 2011, compared to 28 percent in 2010.
  • Private companies in the $20-$40 million range had the highest revenue growth rate (46 percent).
  • 80 percent of private software companies surveyed expect 20 percent or greater revenue growth in 2012, while 30 percent expect higher than 50 percent.
  • Revenue growth rates were higher for the West Coast companies – almost 50 percent versus 36 percent for the East Coast companies.
  • In terms of operating expenses, East Coast companies spent 66 percent of what West Coast companies spent.
  • Employee productivity on the East Coast was 5 percent higher than on the West Coast.
  • East Coast companies anticipate a 35 percent growth in headcount during 2012, compared to 26 percent for West Coast companies.

The 2012 Software Benchmarking Industry Report provides extensive financial and operating metrics for U.S.-based companies with 2011 revenues between $1 million and $350 million. Benchmarks cover key financials, including detailed expense ratios, revenue and profit metrics, geographic break-outs, employee statistics, as well as customer and sales model comparisons. The report also looks specifically at Software as a Service (SaaS) vendors and breaks out all the benchmarks for smaller, private SaaS companies as well as for larger, public, SaaS companies. The 2012 report is the sixth annual benchmarking of the software industry conducted by OPEXEngine.

The 2012 Software Benchmarking Industry Report is available for purchase at www.opexengine.com/reports.  SIIA member companies receive a significant discount on benchmarking.

Rhianna Collier is VP for the Software Division at SIIA.

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Filed Under: Software

SIIA Launches New Affiliate Program to Connect Software Associations & Strengthen the Industry

December 6, 2012 By

Today the SIIA Software Division launched its new Affiliate Program. The new initiative aims to strengthen the software industry by bringing associations together to collaborate and share business intelligence.

The SIIA Affiliate Program, which already includes four participants, provides an opportunity for associations and groups to increase connections within the software industry and work together to improve and take advantage of networking opportunities, visibility, education, and tra­ining resources.

The first four members of the affiliate program are CloudNOW, the Irish Software Association, SVForum, and THINKstrategies. To inquire about joining the SIIA Affiliate Program, contact me.

From  new members of the SIIA Affiliate Program:

  • CloudNOW is a non-profit consortium of the leading women in cloud computing, focused on using technology for the overall professional development of women for networking, knowledge sharing, mentoring, and economic growth.
  • The Irish Software Association is a professional association representing the interests of Irish and multi-national software and computing services companies operating in Ireland.
  • SVForum is a non-profit organization that fosters innovation, entrepreneurship and leadership within the Silicon Valley ecosystem of individuals and businesses.
  • THINKstrategies is the only consulting firm dedicated to helping enterprises make better sourcing decisions, IT solution providers make better marketing decisions, and venture investors make better investment decisions to capitalize on the business benefits of today’s on-demand services, including Cloud Computing, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and Managed Services.

 

Rhianna Collier is VP for the Software Division at SIIA.

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Filed Under: Software

Interview with New Member: Recurly

November 21, 2012 By

SIIA recently welcomed Recurly to the membership. I spoke to their CEO, Dan Burkhart, to find out a little more about the company and the subscription billing marketplace.

Rhianna: Tell me about Recurly. What makes your billing management solution unique?

Dan: Recurly was designed from day one to provide a subscription billing management as a ‘self-serve’ offering. Every single design decision since the first day had this approach in mind – from our application architecture, to our APIs, our interface design and even our pricing and overall transparency of our service. This has afforded us a tremendous competitive advantage, because our application itself is our greatest sales tool. In our business, establishing trust with our customers is a very large part of customer acquisition, and there is no better way to quickly accomplish that than by NOT hiding anything, and by delighting our customers within the first 60 seconds after signup.

Rhianna: You have been particularly successful aligning yourself with strong channel partners. What makes a strong channel partner for Recurly and why are these partnerships core to your business?

Dan: Recurring billing is a painful thing for companies to get set up and operating smoothly. We do everything we can to eliminate payments-related jargon, and to reduce the amount of time and effort required to deliver value to our customers. Our customers are able to go live in days, rather than months required from other enterprise solutions. For channel partners, this means that our service can also be resold very easily because it is designed to be a ‘light-touch, high velocity’ sale.

We have found two distinct kinds of channel partners to date:

  1.  Marketplaces – [Ex. Recurly powers billing for Salesforce's AppExchange Checkout] https://vimeo.com/40358739
  2. Merchant Services Providers – [Ex. Recurly is partnered with TSYS, which has hundreds of salespeople seeking to solve problems for merchants on a daily basis]

The best channel partners are those that share a common passion for helping our mutual customers succeed. In addition, the best partnerships tend to emerge out of a ‘value-sharing’ disposition, rather than a ‘value-capture’ mindset. We always seek to align ourselves with companies that value relationships and show a willingness to invest in growing them over time.

Rhianna: You refer to your solution as “bought not sold”, a formula many other companies would love to have. Did you ever think it would take this direction when you founded the company?

Dan: As a ‘Pay-As-You-Go’ service, we don’t require our customers to enter into long-term, unpleasant contracts. This creates a very different construct from the very early stages of the conversation. For example, if a customer has a set of requirements that we cannot support, we are the first to acknowledge that. We’d rather lose the business than sign up a customer that will be disappointed 60 days later.
By offering Recurly on a month-to-month, pay-as-you-go model, we know that if we disappoint our customers on any level, they are free to leave us at any time. (In fact, one of our core promises to our customers is that we will make it easy to migrate should they ever decide to leave us. We never hold their data hostage – and this only accelerates our goodwill with our customers). This immediately engenders trust because it shows that we have confidence in our offering, and we have nothing to hide. There is a bit of an implied guarantee to our customers with this approach.

Many of our original customers are now getting acquired by larger companies, or individuals are moving to senior posts within new companies, and their positive opinions of Recurly are being carried with them. This is very pleasing to see customer goodwill working as our most effective marketing tool.

Rhianna: Is it true that you can get subscriptions up and running on a website in just days? Even with custom integrations?

Dan: Our customers move from sign-up to production on average in less than a week. Highly customized integrations require several weeks at most. We provide tools to easily integrate PCI compliant checkout forms into our customers’ websites. When publicly traded companies come to us, their legal teams require more time to review documents than it takes developers and product people to get ready for launch.

Rhianna: There is a lot of competition in the subscription billing space today. Where do you think this market is headed in the next 12-18 months?

Dan: The market is growing incredibly quickly. With the costs of storage, bandwidth and computing power all declining together, the distribution model for applications and services has naturally followed suit. With this change in the distribution model, pricing models have naturally evolved towards ‘pay-as-you-go’, (subscription or recurring) billing models. In this new world, you pay for what you consume, or ‘pay to play’.

Cloud and SaaS services are by definition offered on a ‘pay-as-you-go’ basis. Digital content, media, and entertainment are also increasingly offered on either a ‘pay per download’ or subscription basis.

Purchasing psychology of consumers has also evolved. As recently as 5-10 years ago, companies felt that they had to own every last aspect of their own operations in house. During this same era, we were also still buying music CDs in music stores and storing them on our shelves.

Today, companies are increasingly comfortable with ‘renting’ capacity via cloud services, along with renting ‘expertise’ that simply isn’t cost-effective to own internally. Subscription billing fits into this latter category. When you consider the total cost of ownership for enduring PCI audits, as well as the enterprise risk of storing customer credit cards, this category becomes one of the first areas to be considered for outsourcing to experts.

We couldn’t be more excited about this market opportunity and the overall future for Recurly.

 

Rhianna Collier is VP for the Software Division at SIIA.

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Filed Under: Software, Uncategorized Tagged With: , ,

Interview with New Member: Shopping Cart Elite

November 19, 2012 By

Shopping Cart Elite is one of the newest SIIA members. I had a chance to meet with their CEO, Igor Soshkin, and ask him a few questions about the company and their marketplace.

Rhianna: Welcome to SIIA! Tell me a little about Shopping Cart Elite and what makes you unique.

Igor: We are able to provide an all in one solution that combines features from a dozen companies for a fraction of the price. Anyone who is looking for an affordable solution that combines Shopping Cart (Volusion or BigCommerce), CRM and ERP (Netsuite), Multi-Channel Marketing (Channel Advisor or GoDataFeed), Hosted Search (SLI Systems), Price Spying (PriceManager), Support Desk (Zendesk), SEO applications and Social Media applications would love Shopping Cart Elite.

You can read our full story here.

Rhianna: You had great success in the wholesale and automotive industries. Why did you decide to start with a focus on those two verticals?

Igor: When we first started in eCommerce in 2001, it was just my brother Nick Soshkin and I. Since there were no dot net open source shopping carts on the market at the time, we decided to create our own for our company.  We had $20,000 to start the business. Fast track to 2005, we hit our peak gross sales of three million dollars, and we realized that we hit a dead-end. We were paying $125 per hour for data entry and data management, which is a minimum wage job. There was no way of getting inventory levels from our drop ship suppliers; there was no technology to automate the product synchronization between multiple marketplaces such as eBay and Amazon. It was frustrating that we were paying thousands of dollars for security consulting to address server issues, and audit the software for compliance. We had to hire in-house designers to update the website at $60 per hour. When we had to address random website issues, test new releases and pay for servers, our monthly expenses exceeded $40,000 in development. These unnecessary expenses were depleting our profits.

In 2006, we officially stopped growing, and we realized that for us to continue growing we would have to hire more engineers to address minimum wage tasks. We also had to develop more tools to automate parts of our business, which meant more developers on payroll. As the economy started to slow down, we had to find a new way to address our software and technology needs. Paying half a million dollars each year for a small eCommerce business was ridiculous. We sold our eCommerce company and started to focus on figuring out a permanent solution for eCommerce businesses to utilize our knowledge.

When we sold our eCommerce company, we made it our goal to take everything we’ve built thus far and create the best shopping cart on the market. We wanted to address everything that stopped us from growing beyond three million dollars per year. I am extremely passionate and deeply involved in this technology problem. Being an eCommerce expert, I knew what the eCommerce industry needed. Our technology would allow new entrepreneurs to create a real ten million dollar company of their own.

The industry needed a platform like eBay or Amazon, but for eCommerce websites. The platform would use the same template, it would just have different graphics to make it personal. This way we could uniformly enhance the technology every month, and everyone could benefit from the enhanced features without any effects on their design. Over time, the new features would outweigh a custom design, which would only remain custom to the store owner for as long as it took someone to copy the design. Customers don’t care how pretty the website is as long as it is professional, trustworthy, and functional. They only care about the price and inventory. Don’t take my word for it. Just ask any eBay or Amazon top seller how their sales are doing on a platform with 100s of other competitors who look exactly the same, sell the same item, and show up in the same search results. Look at any Fortune 500 website such as Staples, OfficeMax, or BestBuy. They all look alike. All the Fortune 500 companies use the same expensive third party plugins such as social reviews and hosted search.

There are over 500 shopping carts on the market. None of them address the problem that Shopping Cart Elite is trying to solve. If they did, all the Fortune 500 companies would be using them instead of paying millions for custom software development and third party plugins. Shopping Cart Elite is a solid platform for serious eCommerce businesses. We will change the game and put all other failed shopping carts out of business.

Rhianna: You have a marketplace module that allows companies to push their products in various marketplaces. Tell me about this and how you also integrate SEO content.

Igor: Companies can use Shopping Cart Elite as a central data portal. Shopping Cart Elite will then take the product data and synchronize over 30 different marketplace including eBay, Amazon, Google Shopping and every other one you can find. Customers can pick and choose what to submit, and what marketplace. They can choose only to submit certain products with inventory, or the complete store. We also synchronize their inventory to these channels, and we will soon support price and order synchronization.

As for SEO, we are the only Shopping Cart in the industry to focus on native SEO application built right into Shopping Cart Elite. Since the SEO applications are natively built, our customers can benefit use their existing product data to automate their SEO campaigns. For example, a customer can create hundreds of blogs focusing on different niches within their vertical, and have our blog poster syndicate those blogs with content from their store. You can create articles and use our LSI keyword research and SEO content optimizer to exceed the best SEO practices.

Another SEO feature that we have is called Visitor Generated SEO. You have visitors coming to your website, and searching for products using different variations of rich and long tail keywords. Wouldn’t it be awesome if when they typed something, the relevant search results would be turned into an SEO indexable page for Google?  It would be even better if that webpage automatically added itself to the sitemap and ping Google to cache it immediately.

This awesome feature happens to be available on Shopping Cart Elite, and it is called Visitor Generated SEO. It does everything I just described and more. You can also get groups of keywords from Google Adwords Keyword Generator and plug them in by the thousands into your website. This will automatically create

unique content pages for all the popular keywords that Google recommends for your ranking and visitors will start pouring into your website in no time. Shopping Cart Elite is the only platform in the industry to focus on Organic SEO applications. We believe organic should be the core traffic source of any eCommerce business, and our customers agree.

For further details about our SEO, check out the information on our website here.

Rhianna: You have partnered and integrated many third party solutions to your offerings. How important are these partners and will you continue to integrate more third party solutions as appropriate?

Igor: We do partner with many companies, but we do it a little differently from other shopping carts by choosing our partners carefully. We want to deliver a great experience to our customers while making sure the customers pay an affordable price for the complete bundle.

The companies that have a partnership with us benefit from a very close relationship. We usually make sure that we natively integrate their solution in order to achieve a rich user interface and experience for our customers. We opt-in all of our current and new clients on launch day for our partners. We also make sure that all of our new clients are made well aware of our partner solutions. We partially marry our partners, and they become a part of our infrastructure.

We welcome companies to partner with us, but they need to make sure they bring real value to the table.

Rhianna: What are some of the main areas of focus for Shopping Cart Elite in the coming 12-18 months?

Igor: We finally completed our mobile strategy, and we enhanced our customer templates to automatically render the website based on the visitor’s device. The website will automatically reposition and resize elements to fit any screen including desktop, tablet or mobile.

We are also working on a new feature called Traffic Quality Analyzer which will deduct click fraud, bot traffic, visitor who engage (You can read more here about click fraud). We are very active with product development, so it is hard to predict what exactly we will be developing in 12-18 months. This year we exceeded our development roadmap by releasing over 3000 new features, and we plan to exceed that milestone again in 2013.

We are committed to making an affordable all in one ecommerce solution for companies of all sizes.

 

Rhianna Collier is VP for the Software Division at SIIA.

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Interview with New Member, Transverse

October 24, 2012 By

SIIA recently welcomed Transverse, a SaaS billing platform provider. I had a chance to speak with their Co-Founder, President, & CEO, James Messer. James is an 18 year veteran of the telecommunications and IT industries and I asked him about Transverse’s position in the marketplace.

Rhianna: Welcome to SIIA! Tell me a little about Transverse and what makes your billing platform unique.

James: For businesses looking to increase revenue or roll-out new business models, TRACT billing from Transverse is the only all-in-one activity-based billing platform that can meter/rate and bill based on customer behavior. Unlike basic subscription or expensive legacy billing systems, TRACT provides a simple solution to complex billing challenges and enables companies to engage with customers.

Rhianna: Tell me more about activity-based billing, what are the advantages?

James: Consumers are using monthly services to download songs, stream movies or view a digital news article, but most would prefer to only pay for what they use and that’s where subscriptions are limiting. Businesses can provide a more personalized experience for consumers while creating new revenue streams by charging on an activity basis instead.

Rhianna: You talk about this evolution of billing, how it has gone from Billing 1.0 to Billing 3.0. What do you mean when you refer to Billing 3.0?

James: Billing 3.0 means billing is a valuable tool that extends beyond finance department. By capturing revenue in an accurate, timely fashion using activity-based billing, other groups (such as the marketing department), can use the resulting analytics to identify and respond to emerging customer trends faster than competitors. With Billing 3.0, billing becomes a powerful enabler of product innovation and rapid introduction.

Rhianna: I noticed you have a number of partners, payment and technology partners. How important are these partners to the Transverse go-to-market strategy?

James: Partners are a key ingredient to helping our customers succeed. These include active payment partners, such as PayPal, Chase Paymentech, CyberSource, Authorize.net, and First Data. Additionally, we partner closely with technology companies like SugarCRM, Pervasive, OpSource, Rackspace Hosting, and OneLogin to enable seamless integration and ease of use.

 

Rhianna Collier is VP for the Software Division at SIIA.

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Interview with New SIIA Member, CloudNOW

October 17, 2012 By

SIIA recently welcomed CloudNOW to the SIIA community. I recently had a chance to speak to their Founder and President, Jocelyn DeGance Graham.

Rhianna: Welcome to SIIA! You launched CloudNOW just over a year ago. Tell me about your vision for the group.

Jocelyn: CloudNOW is a nonprofit consortium of the leading women in cloud computing, our Mission is simply to promote women in tech. CloudNOW’s biggest differentiator is that we work with the industry rather than in a gender silo, and we focus on what we called ‘applied excellence’ rather than concentrating on gender specific issues, or soft issues such as work-life balance. Our partners are the leading media and event groups for Cloud, IBM, and PwC. In 2013 we hope to build on that success and bring in additional corporate partners.

Rhianna: How has cloud computing opened doors for women in technology?

Jocelyn: Cloud has had an amazing ‘democratizing’ ‘effect for everyone. Almost overnight the economic barriers for starting a company had completely been removed. We no longer needed bank loans, funding, capital investment for hardware…in short the good ole boys and other quid pro quo networks were out and the rest of us, in. And yes, that means women, minorities, kids in their college dorm room, third world countries, etc– total inclusion!

Rhianna: Have you seen an increase in the number of women professionals in our industry?

Jocelyn: With frequency I see articles asking ‘where are the women founders in tech’? I challenge these reporters to actually do their jobs and begin with something as simple as a Google search to uncover the growing number of women in tech and especially, cloud. What we’ve seen from our network is an increase of women who are starting their own companies and taking on the CEO role. We expect that trend to continue, and CloudNOW will be there to support it.

Rhianna Collier is VP for the Software Division at SIIA.

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