Can the financial crisis help SaaS companies in the long term?

No doubt that the financial crisis will hurt everyone. With a frozen financial system the entire idea of US capitalism (borrow cash, put it to work, grow to be profitable, invest again…) is on hold. Eric Schonfeld concluded today that VCs and Startups will not be immune to the crisis and I can not agree with him more. The one thing to remember though, is that a financial Crisis, a war or other disasters impact some people/industries/countries more than others, so while no winners will emerge, some may lose less.

One of the sectors that may lose less is the little (but fast growing) SaaS (Software as a Service) industry. Here is why:

How to measure a good SaaS company

I had an enjoyable lunch meeting with a general partner in a leading Bay Area VC firm and during the discussion he wanted to compare notes on the way I evaluate a good SaaS company. I thought that my answer may be of general interest for employees or investors in the space- so here goes…

Going 100% SaaS

Yesterday I moderated a panel titled “Going 100% SaaS” during Office 2.0 conference.  There is a full video so if you have 40 min to spare you can see it all. It was also covered in Ben Kepes blog. 

The panelist were 3 SaaS vendors (Dan Druker from Intacct,  Rob Holl from Adaptive Planning and Jeff Schultz from Bill.com) and one near 100% SaaS customer, Doug Harr from Ingres. Although we didn’t get to talk much about the future of SaaS, several interesting takeaways came out of the event:

• 100% SaaS is real- Companies like Ingres made strategic decision to become 100% SaaS and they move programmatically toward that. If it was not for Exchange and Office, Ingres would be 100% in the cloud)