Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: David Schmaier, CEO of Vlocity (Part 1)

David was on the founding team of Siebel, back at the very beginning of the CRM industry. Now, with Vlocity, he is focusing on the next wave of industry-specific cloud solutions. Excellent discussion on the future of enterprise software.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with introducing our audience to the company and also to yourself.

David Schmaier: I’m the CEO and founder of Vlocity. Vlocity is the leading provider of industry cloud applications on the Salesforce platform. We deliver industry-specific applications in the cloud for four industries: communications and media, insurance, health insurance, and public sector.

Sramana Mitra: Is this a venture-funded company? How long have you been around? What size are you at?

David Schmaier: It’s not venture-funded. It’s funded by myself and several people who founded a prior company called Veeva Systems. The three Veeva founders founded this company. We funded the company. Recently, we had some strategic partners who wanted to become investors. We decided to let them invest. Salesforce and Accenture are two strategic partners for many reasons. We build on top of their platform exclusively. We also think it’s the world’s number one CRM system. Third, we have a go-to market strategy where we provide industry-specific capabilities into their customer base, which makes the customers happier and allows them to deploy much faster. The partnership with Accenture is, we’re a software company and Accenture is one of the premiere systems integration firm that allows you to get very large companies from point A to point B. Their ability to do business transformations, I believe, is unrivaled.

Sramana Mitra: Do you want to speak to scale? What stage are you at right now?

David Schmaier: This is our second year of operation. We have 130 employees. We have operations around the world and are headaquartered in San Francisco. The founders put in over $10 million to fund the company. Then, we raised $42.8 million in our strategic investor round. Salesforce led that round, and Accenture also participated. That was closed in April of 2015. We used those proceeds to rapidly expand our distribution around the world. Today, we have offices in London, Milan, Paris, Munich, Bangalore, and we’re just opening up operations in Sydney and Toronto.

Sramana Mitra: In the pitch, I was told that you were already about $5 million in revenue?

David Schmaier: More than that.

Sramana Mitra: Talk to me about the thinking behind industry cloud.

David Schmaier: Today, if you are a large corporation, you have a choice. You can either buy industry-specific software, which is all on-premise, or you can buy cloud software. This is true in the front office and the back office. We specialize in the front office domain. In the front office, if you’re a telecommunications company, maybe you buy software from Amdocs or Oracle. All that software is tailored to the needs of telecommunications.

The alternative to that is Salesforce in the cloud. Salesforce is the number one CRM platform. It’s the fastest-growing enterprise software company. By far, all the others are flat or declining. The reason is that the cloud gives you faster time to value. You can roll it out faster and can be more agile and nimble. In 2015, we believe you can have both. What we do is we take Salesforce and take it the last mile so that it allows you to sell the triple play if you’re a company like AT&T. If you’re a government, we do health and human services to allow you to automate all the complicated forms and work flows all in the cloud with our Vlocity Public Sector product. If you’re an insurance company like an AXA, we allow you provide better service and do what’s called multi-lining—not only sell auto insurance, but other lines of insurance as well.

We’ve taken Salesforce and added industry-specific functionality. Now, customers don’t have to choose between industry-specific or cloud. You can get industry-specific and cloud. We call that the industry cloud.

This segment is part 1 in the series : Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: David Schmaier, CEO of Vlocity
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