2007 was a wild year. So wild, in fact, that it's taken me 3 weeks just to get my bearings straight and accept the fact a whole year really has gone by.
In 2007 we tripled our office size, quadrupled our staff, had 5 times more revenue than in 2006, operated profitability, and added 30 new customers.... and I see no change in sight.
Some lessons learned along the way:
Live, Eat, and Drink SaaS:
As a SaaS provider we "eat our own dogfood", so to speak. We run our business entirely on service oriented, on-demand business applications and own zero servers. Here's a sampling of services we use on a daily basis:
Google Apps for Email, Calendars, Documents, IM, and general productivity.
i-Dialogue: Web site, eMarketing, email management
CVSDude: For managing our product source code, versions. Developer collaboration.
Gemini: Pro Service Automation, issue tracking, project management (OK. we actually installed and host this on one of our leased datacenter servers.... but we have a few of those available).
Create, Sell, and Support. Outsource the Rest
We create stuff... sell stuff... and support stuff. Our partners do a much better job at all the other stuff. I've learned to let go of doing too many things in-house and outsourcing to experts when it makes sense.
Maximize Developer Reach
The challenge in 2007 was not so much that our environment wasn't customizable or accessible to Developers. In fact, it was the opposite. *Anything* is possible when you integrate Visual Studio .NET with Salesforce and our productivity gains are massive when using this framework. But sometimes using Visual Studio .NET to customize a web site/portal can be like using a Swiss Army Knife to open a bottle of Corona. Sometimes a simple $0.25 bottle opener will do just fine.
We've recognized several opportunities to move common features found in VS.NET out to the browser, which allows web developers to rapidly customize their web sites without the need for bulky desktop web development tools.
I am practically biting my tongue as I write this as I know what is waiting around the corner in the next release our product. It truly is becoming what Marc Andreessen would refer to as a
Level 3 platform.
I already have a series of blog articles queued up on this exciting announcement, so stay tuned.
Say "No" to Grow
It's hard to say "No" when a lucrative opportunity comes along, but it's important to recognize when "short term gains" could become "long term pains".
In 2007 we successfully said "No" to almost every non-Salesforce.com opportunity. Was it painful? Yes. Did we lose customers, prospects, and partners by committing to this strategy? Yes. Did we grow? Absolutely!
In fact, we're no longer hedging our bets and maintaining 2 brands. Cubic Compass Software, which historically has been focused on on-premise portal solutions and .NET infrastructure since 2001 is undergoing re-branding and a re-launch in February 2008 to focus exclusively on our new service oriented model. i-Dialogue will continue to exist as our hosted solution brand.
With the addition of Jennifer Clark as our Director of Sales and Marketing, I know we'll always have someone at the helm maintaining our focus on what we do best.
Horizontal Over Vertical Integration
I found it very interesting that Rob Carter, CIO of Fedex/Kinkos, acknowledged that it's often easier to add value to your customers by
horizontally integrating services rather than vertically building the infrastructure in-house.
The path of least resistance to solving an IT problem increasingly involves looking outside the 4 walls of an organization and connecting with other services. You integrate with one web service and you just get hooked. Service levels, performance, and reliability are increasing while time to deploy and costs are decreasing. These trends are undeniable and we are witnessing an amazing paradigm shift.
With this strategy in mind, we're foregoing projects like LDAP or SharePoint integration in favor of Google, StrikeIron, and other service oriented integrations.
Predictions for 2008
Should I bother to even make predictions? I wasn't too far off with my
2007 predictions (albeit I was a little too harsh with my consumer app predictions. YouTube turned out to be pretty useful and amazingly scalable)
The fact is, I'm under NDA with some interesting organizations and have consulted/advised on enough upcoming projects to know that 2008 will be a very exciting year for SaaS.
I don't think President McCain would go out on such a limb either as to make predictions about Google's telephony strategy, the acquisition of Citrix and Computer Associates, lower interest rates, sluggish consumer spending until Q4, the invention of new loan consolidation instruments, continued high gas prices, the semantic what?, a major volcano eruption, Ballmer's retirement (to keep Bill company), a huge social mobile PR hype campaign resulting in massive lashback, the beginning consolidation of several Java open source projects under one umbrella, Dell regains #1 position, 0 high-tech IPOs of significance, 2 significant public companies going private, a major security breach involving Chinese espionage, one more zero-day left in WinXP, highest bidder gets bot nets to attack, public demands more government oversight which opens doors to taxing Internet purchases, and..... Tiger Woods wins 2 majors (whew)
