Competing with Giants: Colin Earl, CEO of Agiloft (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s go back to specifics. What was your customer acquisition strategy? Was it direct sales? You had a set of customers who were on your previous product and were switching or upgrading to this one. Was that the first set of customers that you got?

Colin Earl: Yes, that was the first set of customers. The strategy was basically direct sales.

Sramana Mitra: You had a sales force selling this, right?

Colin Earl: Exactly.

Sramana Mitra: What kind of customers did you go after? Were they Fortune 500, Global 2000, or small businesses?

Colin Earl: We targeted the mid to large organizations. The things that make Agiloft valuable, in particular, are things like built-in regulatory compliance. You can track the exact history of every change of every record throughout the entire process. Extreme scalability is another differentiator. We have a number of small companies who have purchased us.

I’m actually very proud of the SMB customer base because of the fact that a tiny organization is able to take Agiloft and deploy it to meet their needs. That reflects the ease with which it can be configured. The norm for large enterprise products is that they can only be used by organizations with large IT staffs. I think it’s much more interesting if you can build a product that’s so easy to configure that even a tiny organization can take your product and run with it. That aside, our primary target market is the mid-sized to large organizations.

Sramana Mitra: What were the primary use cases that you were seeing on your platform?

Colin Earl: Contract management is huge. We had service desk and completely customized products for in-house IT departments. For example, we built, in the space of two weeks, a product that a Fortune 10 organization uses to manage the dissolution of its subsidiary companies abroad. A huge multinational has hundreds of subsidiaries which are setup in the countries that it’s doing business in.

At the end of their financial lives, these entities have to be dissolved. That’s a specialized market. There isn’t a commercial product out there that addresses something like that. As is the case for all such tiny niche needs, they were managing it using a spreadsheet. This is actually the norm rather than the exception – the number of critical business processes that are managed on a spreadsheet.

Sramana Mitra: What was the competition that you were facing in the market in this domain? What were the average deal sizes?

Colin Earl: The average deal size goes down as low as $20,000 but, typically, it’s somewhere between $50,000 and $1.5 million.

Sramana Mitra: What about competition?

Colin Earl: Competition is primarily Apttus for contract management, ServiceNow for service desk, and Salesforce for a pure platform capabilities.

Sramana Mitra: How do you position against the Salesforce PaaS?

Colin Earl: The Salesforce platform is primarily a coding platform. It’s a platform aimed at developers who want to develop code in the Salesforce proprietary language to build products that will run on the SalesForce cloud. Agiloft is a platform that aims to cut the knot of manual software development. It’s a platform that empowers IT organizations to build enterprise products without coding. That’s a technical comparison, but let’s look at it from a business perspective.

One of our Fortune 100 customers is engaged in a large project where we are providing the contract management component and Salesforce is providing the Salesforce automation component. Therefore, this organization has experienced building out completely custom tables in Salesforce using the Salesforce platform and completely custom tables in Agiloft.

It cost them $330,000, on average, per fully built out table in Salesforce. Admittedly, that’s through Accenture. Maybe they could pay significantly less, perhaps half as much, if they were doing it themselves. Still, it cost something in the region of $150,000 to $330,000 to build, test, and migrate from the dev environment to the production environment on Salesforce. In Agiloft, building a completely custom table and getting it to production use costs in the order of $8,000. That’s a 40:1 reduction in cost.

Here’s another example. The Director of Engineering and CIO of NetSuite left to form their own business ENKI. They built the business processes on NetSuite as you would expect. They knew it better than anybody else in the world. It took them six months to configure NetSuite to meet their particular needs. At the end of that time, they threw in the towel. It was just too difficult to configure NetSuite to implement the ENKI vision.

They replaced it with Agiloft and reproduced those six months of customization in the space of two weeks. Since then, they’ve built out completely custom products for compliance management, for example, on the Agiloft platform and adjusted them based upon user feedback in the space of a few hours. In a nutshell, what we provide to our customers is agility. It’s the agility to respond to changing business needs in a matter of hours or days rather than months. It’s the agility to build and deploy enterprise systems in the space of a few weeks rather than six to nine months.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Competing with Giants: Colin Earl, CEO of Agiloft
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