Trends And Opportunities In Cloud Computing: Jim Burleigh, CEO Of Cloud9 (Part 6)

Sramana: What kind of target audience are you after? What size companies do you aim to support?

Jim Burleigh: We believe the floor is 50 to 100 sales reps. Any fewer than that and you can do this relatively well in your head. We look for folks who forecast from the ground up, not the top down. It has to be something that has a sales cycle in it. We are not looking for transactional sales.
When it comes to verticals we look at high tech, life sciences, media, discrete manufacturing, and financial services.

Sramana: What stage was the company in when you came in?

Jim Burleigh: I have been with the company for six months now. We have been around for four years, and we have 50 people now. We have just gotten to the point where we have proven that the market needs and wants our solution, and we have proven the technology. It is now a point of acceleration. We are now building the engine in the company to scale. We are in the transition from startup to small company. It now becomes a lot of managerial best practices and operations as opposed to a good idea.

Sramana: To date you have done four enterprise software companies that have had SaaS involved in them. Would you give me an overview of the gaps that exist in enterprise software today from your perspective?

Jim Burleigh: The obvious gap is that SaaS applications still have not taken over as many places as they should. That will continue to grow at tremendous rates. There are some applications that make sense to do on premise but there are a lot of applications that really need to be done via SaaS.

Second, a lot of enterprise software is still designed with old school concepts. They design with complexity and want to teach the user how to use the advanced features. They need to be hit upside the head with the concept of consumer technologies. Nobody has ever taken training to know how to use eBay. It is a complex application, but if you don’t get it when you log on, then it has failed. Useability is crucial, and it is a huge hole.

One of the big areas that is wide open is the combination of what SaaS offers and what SMB needs. There is an opportunity for a suite of vertical SaaS applications around running SMB businesses such as a car wash or a gas station. There is a tremendous amount of money available in that, but individually each one of those things is not as interesting and not as sexy as some other businesses. In 10 or 15 years, somebody will dominate that whole marketplace.

Sramana: In the meantime there are slivers of a business that you can build, a gas station software business is probably a 5 to 10 million dollar business.

Jim Burleigh: Exactly. Things are starting to happen there, but there is no major uptake on that. The sum total of those SMB marketplaces is massive.

Sramana: Right now there are a lot of SaaS companies that cater to the SMB and they are doing very well. It is now possible to reasonably penetrate that sector.

Jim Burleigh: I think it is. I think a lot of the existing ones are more horizontal than vertical, and I think the vertical opportunity is the one that is very interesting.

This segment is part 6 in the series : Trends And Opportunities In Cloud Computing: Jim Burleigh, CEO Of Cloud9
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