Trends And Opportunities In Cloud Computing: Jim Burleigh, CEO Of Cloud9 (Part 7)

Sramana: It sounds like you are productizing a best practice in sales management. That would do very well for SMBs as well. Obviously there is low-hanging fruit you must pick now, but the SMB could be applicable for the future.

Jim Burleigh: You hit an interesting point. Part of the implementation of our forecasting and pipeline management application is us going in and taking the time to discover the practice that the company has used and the practice that they want to use. That must be instantiated into the systems that the company wants delivered. There is a sales process discovery piece to that and a business process discovery piece to that. We do that for all of our customers.

Now, can we take those best practices and bring them to the benefit of the SMB? Absolutely. That would be very useful. The SMB must want to consume that, and your suite of best practices would have to be sufficiently large enough to satisfy SMB demand. The metrics that go along with that are also critical. The problem is the cost of distribution, which is the traditional SMB problem.

The way SMB will follow for us is that we will have greater success in the enterprise area. Once that becomes a standard and we will start to see people who leave enterprises and go work for SMBs demand the same tools that they used at the enterprises. SMBs will then clamor for it, and once we hit that point it becomes feasible from a margins perspective. If we have to chase them, it won’t be feasible.

Sramana: There is a lot going on in CRM SaaS that pushes the cost structure way down; at the same time, SaaS companies offer the same functionality that is only offered at the higher end.

Jim Burleigh: That is a very mature marketplace. The pattern that SaaS followed there is known, so we don’t have to invent the pattern. We do have to invent the distribution and delivery model. You can now go to the Amazon cloud and build your application on the offerings you find there. You can get started with a lot less money. That is when SMB can be tackled. You don’t have the educate people on the SaaS model or on CRM.

There are a lot of other opportunities out there in the vertical spaces. SMBs are comfortable using SaaS, but they just don’t have options to use it for their core application.

Sramana: What is the game plan with Cloud9? Where do you go from here now that you are in the $5 million  to $10 million range?

Jim Burleigh: Over the next six months we will focus on rounding out product functionality. The following six months will be about distribution. We doubled last year, and we should more than double next year. We have the opportunity to bring intelligence into a normal line of business applications. If things go correctly we will start an upswell in analytics applications.

Sramana: Is there competition in your space?

Jim Burleigh: There was one company called Right90, but there were technology issues there so they were sold. The competition we face is from BI.

Sramana: That is a good thing because it means the organization understands there is something they want to do, and they have tried to do it on their own with BI and failed to do it as well as you do. That is not a bad situation to be in.

Jim Burleigh: It would be nice to have more competitors to help generate the marketplace. People don’t search for forecasting solutions because they don’t think it exists. Even though we focus on increasing the win rate, people still clamor for forecasting.

Sramana: That depends on how you market it.

Jim Burleigh: That’s right, that is the interesting challenge there. We have to make the connection to what the user thinks in their head. We have to do user education.

Sramana: Congratulations on your success to date. I look forward to following your continued success.

This segment is part 7 in the series : Trends And Opportunities In Cloud Computing: Jim Burleigh, CEO Of Cloud9
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