Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Amit Jain, Chief Product Officer, ServiceMax (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: How much of this industry do you think has a solution?

Amit Jain: I’ll put it this way. Our enterprise customers also grow by acquisition. There are also inherent technical debts as well. It’s a herculean task for these companies to have a uniform technology strategy. Maybe 10 different ERP and homegrown field services.

A lot of these companies have a solution in place. Typically, the smaller ones have paper and pencil solutions and a lot of homegrown IT solutions as well. The point is how and when they’ll evolve into solutions such as ServiceMax. We think that there are enough proof points in the market from an ROI perspective for these companies to go in more aggressively now versus five to seven years ago.

Sramana Mitra: It looks like you can easily build a billion-dollar business based on where you are currently. As the last segment, I would like to discuss acquisitions. One of the reasons I really like this bootstrapping by piggybacking strategy is because it makes exit very easy. Companies that acquire from within the ecosystem are a lot easier.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that ServiceMax is a likely Salesforce acquisition. That’s why private equity is interested in taking on something like this. I would like you to talk on that topic more for the benefit of the entrepreneurs who are studying this model.

If you look at Atlassian, for instance. They have been constantly acquiring in their ecosystem. Salesforce has constantly acquired from within its ecosystem. The primary reason is, it’s a compatible technology stack. It has tremendous value in integration.

Amit Jain: We completed an acquisition last November of a company called Liquid Frameworks that does oil and fuel services. They’re a Force.com-based solution. We are looking at industries and verticals that excite us from a growth perspective. Then we have to decide on how we want to execute against it. We’re not the largest company there. We’re large enough where we have these build-buy-partner discussions.

When you see candidates out there who might fit into that buy or partner category, you start assessing. Acquisitions are messy. When we think about what’s attractive, we also think about what makes it easy from a product integration perspective. When we looked at Liquid Frameworks, this team had a lot of domain expertise in the oil field service.

Sramana Mitra: Domain knowledge is super critical in vertical cloud strategy.

Amit Jain: Yes. You framed us in the same way that we viewed Liquid Frameworks. When you choose the spaces to play in, you always understand who are the big guys out there. If they threw a lot of resources at what we’re trying to solve, how would we win against them? There are technology choices that you’ll make that make you more attractive for opportunities.

As I mentioned earlier, it has helped the partnership that we have with Salesforce. As an entrepreneur thinking about getting strategic partnerships for distribution that could lead to an OEM or exit, technology choice is critical.

Amit Jain

Sramana Mitra: I enjoyed our conversation. Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Amit Jain, Chief Product Officer, ServiceMax
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