Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Ulf Zetterberg, CEO of Seal Software (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: I imagine it’s a fairly horizontal process. You basically work with all kinds of companies, right?

Ulf Zetterberg: Yes. There are certain industries though that particularly have more challenges and therefore see extra value with Seal. We also have an analytical module, which allows customers to do ad hoc queries and specific correlations of information. Financial Services is one of our largest verticals. Financial Services are hit by new regulatory requirements almost on a monthly basis. They can’t project what they need to capture on contracts on an on-going basis. Rather than burden their production systems, they use the metadata in those systems for what is needed to run the day-to-day business. When they need to rummage for regulatory questions or disputes, they use Seal to extract the information. Contracting per se is horizontal, but once you get into verticals, you can also have various industry-specific languages that you start to capture.

Sramana Mitra: You have heuristics that are specific to that industry?

Ulf Zetterberg: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: Is there any other major industry bias in your segmentation?

Ulf Zetterberg: Yes, high-tech IP provisions. How they license software? What third-party software is used? What right they have to license this specific product when they resell something? High-tech is a big sector of healthcare. Media and entertainment are growing as well because of royalty provisions. It’s very fast-moving. Today, the two biggest sectors are high-tech and financial services. The third one is energy.

Sramana Mitra: Are you working with enterprise clients only?

Ulf Zetterberg: They’re the obvious. Fortune 2000 is clearly a sweet spot. We have mid-size customers as well that wants to be more effective around the legal functions. Automation around legal processes is one of the trends in the industry today regardless if its enterprise or mid-size customers. This is to create efficiencies around how you manage your contracts. This is not just from a contract management perspective but also on how you’re handling contracts and get insights into contracts across the enterprise. We have a couple of clients that are mid-sized, but they’re fairly large clients. They also spend a significant amount of time and energy in solving these problems.

Sramana Mitra: Who buys contract management software inside of the enterprise?

Ulf Zetterberg: Usually, it’s the legal function. The legal function is always involved when it comes to contracting. By default, they’re the custodians of legal risk and decide what clauses and language are to be used and accepted. Legal is always part of the project. Procurement manager and supplier manager, and CPO are involved as well. On the sell side, it could be sales directors or sales managers that want to stream up the sales process or there can be a sales operations manager who can be involved. It depends if it’s a sell-side or buy-side-driven project, but legal is always there. Either the general counsel or someone assigned by the general counsel is there.

Sramana Mitra: How do you price?

Ulf Zetterberg: We price per contract. We have an annual subscription model, so customers pay per contract per year. We don’t care how much data there is. We only charge for the contracts we find and manage in the Seal repository.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Ulf Zetterberg, CEO of Seal Software
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