We are beginning to see it unfold.  Just a few days ago, Atlanta based Cox Media sold three Connecticut radio stations to Connoisseur Media in Westport, CT.  Inside Radio reports on FCC filings that show Cox is also selling stations in Alabama, South Carolina, Hawaii and Virginia to Summit Media and private equity firm High Point Summit.

Cox Media also started using Navatar Corporate Development CRM service last July, after the company announced a new strategy focused on larger markets, cross market collaboration and heightened impact in fewer markets.  They are clearly executing that strategy.

The AdMedia Partners survey shows that mobile remains the area of greatest expected opportunity and a clear driving force behind continued change in the marketing and media landscape. The survey also found that the wisdom of whether to sell or buy has been steadily converging over time, signaling that 2013 is an equally good time for buyers and sellers to act compared to previous years.

We are also finding increased activity in this sector on Navatar Deal Connect, where buyers and sellers meet.  We have also seen more media corporate buyers (and sellers) register on the site during the last few months.

Our competitors are mostly on premise software providers, who charge insane amounts of money for software from 2 generations ago. Their products were not created for today’s interactive internet and social media world – in fact, it is very hard to modify them. If a user wants a report, you cannot just quickly generate it – you have to pay the vendor $15000 to $20000 in services fees to develop a report for you. There are very high implementation and support fees involved.

The other set of competitors we have are consultants that convince financial firms that their problem is very unique and no off-the-shelf product will fit their needs. They make tons of money reinventing the wheel at the customer’s expense.

However, it’s our value proposition that is compelling for these firms. To quote from the interview:

Our customers love our products because they’re out-of-the-box, based on a pay-as-you-go model and are fully supported by industry experts. They are very flexible, reporting is easy, and the products can be used from mobile devices. And, they are built on Salesforce, the cloud computing leader, so the customer data doesn’t sit on the servers of some local provider. It is as secure as it gets.

Even more importantly, cloud computing and multitenancy enables continuous improvement of the products. Customers get free upgrades as the products improve.

In addition, I think salesforce.com has done a fantastic job of eliminating most of the apprehensions around data security – they have made our job much easier.

To read the full interview, please click on the link below:

Cloud Computing Takes Shape Over Wall Street

Alok Misra

Not everyone agrees, though. An increasing number of dealmakers today are taking a very different approach to relationship building. These savvy private equity or strategic buyers approach intermediary relationships as more of a science than art. They are investing their efforts in building much larger and efficient networks, to compete for deals in the fast-paced age of cloud computing and social media.

The “old way” of doing business, for private equity buyers/sellers, was centered around maintaining 100-200 closely held relationships with intermediaries. A lot of nurturing went into these relationships – frequent phone calls, meetings & lunches required a significant investment of time.  ”Word of mouth” was usually the way to learn about and be introduced to new intermediaries.

In the new online world, “quantity” is the key to success. Today’s dealmakers maintain 5,000 – 10,000 intermediary relationships that they can easily initiate using online deal marketplaces (such as Navatar Deal Connect). The time they spend on each relationship is really minimal – some of them only make 5 minute phone calls to each intermediary 2-3 times a year. Instead, they use email blasts and social media tools such as twitter and linkedin to communicate regularly and use cloud-based CRM such as Navatar Private Equity or Navatar M&A to manage the communication, relationships and the resulting deal flow.

At the end, intermediary relationships are still critical. What is changing is the efficiency needed to manage a much larger number of these relationships, to increase the deal flow correspondingly.  Maybe it’s not as important for some of the larger players, who have their own worldwide networks – but for smaller firms, the new order is a necessity.

Ask Martin Stein, Managing Director of Blackford Capital, who has been one of the pioneers of this new approach. In this recorded webinar, The New Rules of Private Equity, Martin provides a lot of metrics around these efficiencies and how a firm’s deal sourcing efforts can benefit from them. According to him, one big advantage of this approach is that a smaller firm, with limited resources, can have the ability to compete with much larger players, for similar deals.

Intermediaries are also taking notice. After all, they are the ones that may be able to push this change faster.

Alok Misra

Distractions can be plenty.  Martin Stein, Managing Director of Blackford Capital, who is one of the most tech-savvy private equity professionals, discusses some of these issues in a new video. He outlines why focus is so critical in the private equity world.

Martin has been one of the early adopters of cloud technologies and social media, deploying Navatar Private Equity CRM, which is built on the Salesforce platform, at Blackford Capital 3-4 years ago. Blackford Capital is a private investment firm that acquires, manages, and grows middle-market manufacturing, distribution, and service companies. Blackford also uses Navatar Deal Connect for deal sourcing and building intermediary relationships.

According to Martin, the cloud has helped Blackford Capital focus their time and efforts a lot less on deal sourcing, so they can allocate more time towards their portfolio companies. He adds:

“In the end, it is finding a good deal and managing that deal effectively that allows us to drive higher returns for our LPs.” 

In addition to the video, do not miss the recorded webinar, The New Rules of Private Equity, with Martin Stein, to learn about the detailed metrics that Blackford uses to improve operating performance. When it comes to focus, Martin is one of the pros in the business.

Alok Misra

When (prominent) people make claims such as this one, it may either be because they’re old school (and haven’t yet grasped the realities of the cloud) or they’re just making a self-serving statement. Since Oracle has historically taken a consistent stand against multitenancy (see my article O Multitenancy: Will Thy Survive Oracle), I would guess it’s the latter.

So, first let me just say it bluntly. If you’re buying a product which is labeled “cloud” but is not multitenant, you’re simply buying on-premise software. It may still be good software but it is not cloud software. The entire concept of the cloud is based on sharing resources, which is accomplished through multitenancy. My InformationWeek article, “Why Multitenancy Matters in the Cloud,” highlights why a buyer should care about multitenancy.

You cannot compare multitenancy in the cloud to a feature in a VHS player. An apt comparison would be with the concept of an assembly line in manufacturing. What Henry Ford, with the assembly line, gave to the world was a radically efficient way of producing vehicles. The other automakers at that time, who didn’t switch to this model, claimed that it didn’t matter to the car buyer how the operations of a car manufacturing plant were structured, as long as the car had all the desired features (technically, they were correct). In due course, however, each of the automakers was either forced to switch to the assembly line or go out of business, because of all the reasons now apparent to everyone.

Marc Benioff and salesforce.com demonstrated to the world what multitenancy can do – they did to software what Henry Ford did to manufacturing (or Steve Jobs did to mobile computing). If their tremendous success isn’t evidence, wait for a few more years to witness the gradual demise of the traditional software delivery model (that doesn’t mean the traditional vendors won’t fight tooth and nail to convince the world that the cloud and multitenancy don’t matter).

In fact, multitenancy operates at several levels in the cloud world. Salesforce is multitenant and Navatar, another layer of cloud software used by financial firms, which sits on top of Salesforce, is also multitenant. Which means that as and when either Salesforce or Navatar improves, all customers automatically benefit. As more customers sign up, they share the cost, so both Salesforce and Navatar benefit.

So getting back to the Oracle platform, Meg does say that it is also multitenant, but according to her, what really matters is business value, not multitenancy. That’s stating the obvious – of course, no product (even it is a photocopier) can survive if it doesn’t deliver business value. But why the stand against multitenancy?

As, I wrote in my InformationWeek article, “Those who say multitenancy isn’t necessary to making the cloud model work are typically companies that have long made money from on-premise software and don’t want to cannibalize their existing revenues. They might offer a subscription for their single-tenant application, but this could simply be the software license, maintenance, and hosting fees divided into monthly payments which almost certainly would be much higher than a comparable multi-tenant application.”

That may be one explanation – Oracle may prefer to install boxes at every client site, so naturally, they find multitenancy to be a thorn in their side. Another explanantion, as David Linthicum offers in his Infoworld post, “The Silly Debate About Multitenancy,” is that vendors often “find that building multitenant architectures is a much bigger nut to crack than they thought.”  Either way, Linthicum agrees, there should be no debate here: “Cloud computing, both private and public, requires the concept of multitenancy. The traditional providers are welcome in the cloud as long as they can provide multitenancy. If you can’t do it, then don’t try to argue that it’s not needed. Get to work!”

As Denis Pombriant observes, IT is over.  As a buyer of a cloud product be aware: If you’re buying a cloud product that isn’t multitenant, you’re buying it from someone who really wants to sell you boxes or consulting or something else – there is a high probability that that product won’t survive the next few years.

Alok Misra

“Foreign market leaders such as Fidessa, Direct Edge and Navatar are challenging local providers in the race to meet the booming region’s needs,” says the article.

Read the full article here. It goes on to say:

One subsector of the industry in particular is pioneering a new paradigm of easy distribution: cloud computing. One of the leaders in cloud computing for global investment is Navatar, a New York based firm. Their first product line came out 3 years ago, and in the last year sales have more than doubled, giving the company a name recognition that has attracted major international financial firms. The hardware and software with which they serve their clients is hosted by the cloud computing host Salesforce.com.

The major financial firms they are referring to, are names such as PNC and Jefferies. In Latin America, we have customers such as Banco Lafise, a prominent bank. One big reason they like our products is that they never have to go to their IT departments or hire consultants. As the article quotes me:

“Our products are very tailored to the type of asset class,” Alok Misra explains, “But they are also out-of-the-box, so companies don’t have to spend so much on IT and maintenance – it’s all included at no additional cost.”

Another key reason for our success globally is Navatar Deal Connect, the free marketplace for middle market deals – if you’re a dealmaker in Latin America, there is no better way to build relationships in America and Europe – without spending a penny.

Stay tuned for more developments in this exciting region.

Alok Misra.

Navatar Deal Connect is the free online marketplace for middle market transactions, used by thousands of dealmakers worldwide. Salesforce CRM helps manage fundraising, investor relations, deal sourcing, deals, portfolio and much more.

Register here.  In this webinar, you will learn how these two critical tools now work together, so you can:

• Build private connections and interact confidentially on relevant transaction opportunities worldwide, and have those connections and deals be delivered right to your Salesforce CRM
• Use Salesforce, fully pre-built, for automating investor relations, deal management, deal sourcing, portfolio management as well as secure investor reporting – without paying any extras
• Quickly benefit with little to no investment, so you can save your precious time and money instead of spending it on subscriptions or software development/maintenance

“US-based Navatar Group is a leading provider of cloud computing for Wall Street firms, but increasingly that client base is widening out to alternative investment managers as they start to fully appreciate the benefits of cloud systems and how they can streamline their operations.”

We see this as a sector that will be gaining a lot of prominence in the US, given the regulatory changes that are anticipated. However, we have also received significant attention from European firms recently and our customer base across the pond has been growing rapidly. We are working on recruiting resellers in each country so we can provide local support. More on that soon …

But I’m truly happy that only 1 out of 50 prospects now mention data security as a concern (our partner salesforce.com has done an excellent job of alleviating those concerns). I’m excited because it takes us to the next step – opening the door for some game changing innovation, as Greg Johnsen points out in his Wired magazine article, The future belongs to cloud-networked companies.

“We’re only in the second inning of cloud computing. Its most profound impact will not be on reducing total cost of ownership, but rather for enabling powerful, game-changing systems — that were not possible before.

Today’s systems were designed for a world without an internet. They assumed little to no connectivity between or across companies. They were designed for companies, in isolation — not communities or “networks” of companies collaborating together.

To survive, companies must transform themselves from silo-based, inward-facing corporate operators to interconnected, highly agile business network orchestrators. They must leverage newer cloud-based B2B platforms designed specifically for inter-company process orchestration and collaboration on a global scale.

I will be communicating more about the cloud platforms of the future, that we and some of the others have been building (it will take more than just Navatar to bring about this change). So back to Hedgeweek, and as I am quoted in their article:

“As with everything, change only happens when clients realise it’s possible and force the vendors.”

Alok Misra

For those alternative assets firms still relying on on-premise equipment, they have the weekend to work on business continuance issues. We hope that they have data backed up to a remote site with some provision for  employees to work from home by dialing into a remote server using encryption.  If they don’t have a remotely backed site, they need to plan for power issues, lost telephone service  and potential damage to the closet or data center that houses their equipment.

We expect the storm to be less of an issue for firms that are using Cloud computing. For example, in the case of Navatar private equity, hedge fund, M&A along with Corporate M&A and VCclients, their data is stored in more than one location (salesforce.com servers mirrored and backed up across data centers). They can expect to face the loss of power but fortunately battery powered laptops, iPads, iPhones, BlackBerrys and Android devices can bridge the gap until power comes back up. Because of a couple of storms last year, many of the people I know in Connecticut now have generators at their homes that will not only save the food in their freezers but will allow them to work without interruption.  By the way, the Navatar Support Team is geographically dispersed so they will not be affected and available to support customers.

The biggest vulnerability for the Cloud clients is losing access to the Internet. It just takes one tree to take out cable delivered broad band service. Fortunately, there is cellular data coverage as an alternative. Most people have access to more than one smart phone. It might make sense to forgo the family plan and put one of your phones on AT&T and have another member of the family use Verizon or some other service. If you do lose service you still have the option of driving to another location (unless that tree that knocked the wires down happens to be blocking your way).

One situation that’s a challenge for both those with either the on-premise or Cloud model is having the schools closed for week with the kids home. As a private equity executive told me today, that scenario really makes it hard to get work done!

We’re hiring for marketing, sales and product management. You must be an overachiever, that thrives in an entrepreneurial environment. You must have the DNA that drives the faster pace of cloud companies.

You think this may be you or your friend. Then read on:

Marketing manager to lead the marketing team? You’ll work as a key member of our core team and be accountable for developing and driving a strategic marketing plan. You will work closely with the sales team, product team, customer success team, resellers, partners, customers, prospects and PR agencies. You will be defining the messaging and positioning of Navatar products for various markets. You will lead the end to end communication and execution of the marketing plan.

You must have 4-6 years recent experience managing the full marketing lifecycle for a SaaS, or cloud company and at least 2 years experience in lead end to end marketing programs for a specific product. You must have hands-on experience in the development and execution of corporate and customer communications programs as well as communicating across traditional and new social media channels. Knowledge of financial industry may be a plus.

Product Managers to drive the development of Navatar cloud products. You will guide a team that is charged with a product line contribution as a business unit. This extends from increasing the profitability of existing products to developing new products for the company. You will build products from existing ideas, and help to develop new ideas. You must have the ability to create a big-picture vision, the attention to detail required to translate the vision into executable work components and the drive to make that vision a reality. You must enjoy spending time with customers and prospects to understand their problems, and find innovative solutions for the broader market.

You must have 2-6 years experience managing products in a cloud environment – experience with the Salesforce platform/ecosystem will be a big plus. You will have the ability to work with business and technology teams as well as a diverse customer base in multiple countries. Financial services experience desirable.

Account Executives to join our dynamic, high energy sales team. Ideal candidates should possess solid B2B technology sales experience, in a?fast-paced environment. You will be empowered to sell the popular Navatar financial solutions that are used by large and small firms worldwide. You must be smart, ambitious and a quick learner, to take advantage of an opportunity with incredible growth potential.

You must have 2-4 years of quota carrying software sales experience, with a track record of over-achieving quota (top 10-20% of company) in past positions. You will have experience managing sales cycles for a large number of deals, simultaneously. Bachelor Degree required. Experience selling to financial institutions will be a plus.

If you’ve never heard of Navatar, we are a leading provider of cloud computing for Wall Street, with customers in more than 30 countries. Our financial cloud solutions for capital markets, asset management & banking are used by leading banks and financial institutions worldwide, such as PNC Bank, M&T Bank and Jefferies. We are one of the top ISV partners of salesforce.com, and all our products are built in the Salesforce cloud. Navatar is headquartered on Wall Street, New York.

Please email careers@navatargroup.com. Spread the word.

Alok Misra

Don’t miss this webinar, Introduction to Navatar Deal Connect, so you can take advantage of Navatar Deal Connect, the free global online marketplace for collaborating on middle market transactions. Learn how Deal Connect is helping thousands of investment firms, investment bankers & corporate development professionals build private connections and interact confidentially on relevant transaction opportunities worldwide.

Navatar Deal Connect is completely free, not just for sellers but also for buyers – there are no subscription fees or transaction fees. It is integrated with Salesforce CRM, making it easy for you to build connections and collaborate on opportunities.

In this webinar, run by Allan Siegert and Ketan Khandkar, you will learn how to quickly set up your account with preferences and start making connections.

View the webinar here. Also, feel free to post your thoughts.

Alok Misra

The New York Times

“It turns out there is always an idiot around who doesn’t think much about the thumb drive in their hand,” said a plan architect.

The term “idiot” is probably unfair. The people working at a nuclear plant probably are smart but thinking about other things than security. That’s why the ruse was so clever. Who hasn’t received a thumb drive as a promotion and stuck it into a computer without thinking.

The people we work with in private equity are all smart with great educations. Regardless, I expect that some are still keeping your strategic buying targets, your notes and investor lists in Excel. Probably still saving your spreadsheets onto virus vulnerable hard drives and backing up and moving data with thumb drives. Right?

Perhaps one of the partners is at this moment using a thumb drive he/she received as a promotional gift.

As head of sales here, it would be irresponsible not to say that you would be safer with Navatar and by having your data stored securely, mirrored and backed up in the salesforce.com Cloud. That way, only you have the logins and the ability to access your data.

So, think twice about that thumb drive. Talk to us about upgrading to Navatar.

Allan Siegert

There may be several reasons for low cloud sales, but I think one of the most important one is pricing. Take any popular desktop software like Microsoft Office or Symantec Antivirus: it always has a different price for the India market which, typically, may be 40-50 percent lower than its price in western markets. Cloud computing services such as Google Apps, Microsoft Azure and Amazon EC2, offer no regional pricing for India. In fact, most of these are priced in US dollars. They also, mostly, accept only credit card payments. In fact, Microsoft recently started accepting Indian rupee cheques for their online services, but only for larger customers.

When it comes to TCO, Indian firms have a different formula for software/hardware depreciation as well as IT manpower costs. Cloud pricing turns out to be too high for them. Moreover, paying thousands of dollars through credit cards is not something that most Indian companies are comfortable with.

So can the cloud pricing ever get lower for Indian markets? For on premise software, offering lower pricing for Indian markets may be easier. All they have to do is to copy the software on a disc and sell it. The only costs are related to packaging and distribution. In the cloud, there are added infrastructure costs that the cloud provider has to bear for every seat sold. If a cloud vendor is maintaining mirrored multitenant infrastructure, with data centers in several continents, there may be no easy way to lower pricing for one country (or one tenant).

What if the cloud vendor’s infrastructure was completely located in India? A homegrown cloud vendor would, arguably, be able to provide better pricing to Indian customers. We would then have CRM, ERP and all kinds of other SaaS solutions made in India, hosted in India and priced for India.

That sounds great but it also assumes that customers (Indian companies) of these SaaS solutions wouldn’t have to do any business internationally. With global customer bases and supply chains, nowadays, is that really possible? As Indian companies try to compete in the global arena, would they really want to use software that takes them in the opposite direction?

So, Indian clouds may be able to solve the pricing issue but may fall short in other areas. However, they may still be able to play an important role getting the global players to drop their prices.

Of course, in addition to pricing, there are other significant barriers, such as the absence of a cloud ecosystem, high speed connectivity and the general lack of awareness. However, as with most things, if the economics works out, everything else will follow.

What do you think?

Amit Chaudhary

Nicholas Donato explores how technology and social networking are influencing the way private equity funds operate, in his well-written article for the PEI Fund Administration & Technology Compendium, titled:

The fund of tomorrow … today

One of the questions that the article raises is whether social networking can change the way deals are sourced, in a people business like private equity? Here is an excerpt from the article:

….. Navatar is also rolling out a free cloud service to connect GPs with M&A bankers and other industry contacts to form an online community where deals can be collaborated. Navatar’s social networking site for private equity professionals works by having buyout shops create an online profile describing the types of deals they target alongside their contact information. Bankers, business owners and other sources of deal flow can then access profiles that match their capital seeking enterprises.

The free cloud service, that Nicholas refers to, is Navatar Deal Connect, scheduled for a beta launch in late August. The article goes on to say:

At the moment GPs don’t rely on portals for originating transactions, sources say. Private equity is after all a people business, points out Philipe Bucher, chief financial officer of Adveq. But similar to the evolution of social networking sites, who’s to say one portal won’t feed off its own success to morph into a dominant internet presence, a feat Facebook accomplished after eclipsing rival sites such as hi5 and MySpace. One can imagine a GP in the future sourcing deals from the comfort of an armchair, jokes Bucher when asked whether portals have the potential to be a significant source of deal flow down the line.

Will GPs ever get comfortable with the idea of sourcing deals from an armchair? I’ve never been a GP in a private equity firm, so I’m not sure I have the credentials to answer that (although that doesn’t stop me from babbling about how deal sourcing is about to change). I can tell you, though, that during the early days of Linkedin, most of us who were sourcing consulting business for Deloitte (that’s what I did back then) scoffed at the idea of getting a Linkedin account – of course, most of my management consulting buddies (Deloitte partners) have had a (dramatic) change of heart on this issue.

OK, I’m biased, but what would it take for a social networking portal to bring about this change, in your opinion?

Alok Misra

If you haven’t noticed middle market private equity dealmakers trolling for deal flow these days, just join the cocktail hour of an industry networking event. Buyers, sellers, intermediaries (and others) frantically seek each other at these events, exchanging business cards and pieces of paper, as M&A activity heats up.

I’m sure that searching for deals was a similar exercise 20 years ago (maybe even 50). You’d think things would have changed, considering the increased cross-border M&A activity, or considering we have tools like internet, social networking and iPads. But they haven’t. Let’s see why.

Here’s an excerpt from a brochure related to a recent event (organized by Capital Roundtable):

With more and better deals out there, there’s also a great deal of competition. So it’s never been so important to refine your strategy, improve your tactics, and study the approaches that are working for others. You just don’t want random deal flow. Rather, you want the right deal flow where you see opportunities that are relevant to your strengths — and likely to be successful.

That takes a thoughtful marketing plan, one that you execute with precision and recalibrate as needed. And it takes familiarity with all the potential avenues for originating deals today, from intermediaries and auctions and trade shows and ACG parties — to email campaigns and LinkedIn networks and Google AdWords….

And today, most firms are trying to figure out how to leverage social media and Internet presences into tangible deal sourcing. Yet before you jump in with both feet, you’ll want to know how results are being generated by Facebook pages, LinkedIn groups, and Twitter tweets.

While no 800-pound gorilla website has yet evolved for aggregating private equity deals, …..

So it seems like you need more time (and more money) today to find deals, even though there are more channels than ever to connect with the right people. No wonder, things haven’t changed much.

They will, only if the 800 pound gorilla turns out to be more than just a website or a portal (or a social networking site, for that matter). The gorilla would have to take the critical elements of the old-school networking and relationships and scale them for a global M&A arena.

That’s our goal.

The outcome – Dealmakers won’t have to go looking for sellers (or buyers) – the deals will come to them … without having to pay anything.

The technology – cloud computing (the same technology that Navatar Private Equity CRM and Navatar M&A CRM runs on).

Stay tuned.

Alok Misra

Sunny Vanderbeck’s bio:

Sunny Vanderbeck has a track record of high achievement in all of his endeavors, including as an entrepreneur, CEO, investor, board member, and military leader. Prior to co-founding Satori Capital, Mr. Vanderbeck co-founded and served as Chief Executive Officer of Data Return, a leading provider of managed services and utility computing. As CEO for eleven years, Mr. Vanderbeck led the company through all phases of growth and transformation. The company sustained 40% quarter-over-quarter growth and reached $50 million in revenue after only three years.

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Businesses drastically needed more efficient and economical enterprise software, and once customers were experiencing success with our CRM application, we realized that we could achieve something even more significant. What if we made our platform available to let others build their own cloud apps? The idea to offer our platform as a service was also a way to resolve our own problem: customers were demanding more apps, and we couldn’t build everything ourselves. But – more importantly, and something that as an engineer I could truly appreciate – it offered an opportunity to change the landscape for anyone who created applications.

There was so much that was arduous about software development. (If you haven’t been there, trust me; I was one of those sleep-deprived developers.) There were the purchases: networking devices, storage systems, databases, app servers, data centers. Then we had to write the software and ensure it was fast, high quality, mobile and above all scaled for the Internet. There were technology issues to address, such as authentication and availability. It seemed as if the to-do list never ended…

Those are the words of Parker Harris, Cofounder, salesforce.com. They have been excerpted from Parker’s Foreword for my recent book, Thinking of Force.com as your Key to the Cloud Kingdom, co-authored by Ian Gotts.

To read the entire Foreword from Parker Harris, download a free book summary here:

http://navatargroup.com/book-force-com-as-your-key-to-the-cloud-kingdom.html

Alok Misra

The startup had done really well in their first year. They started with $500k of seed money, and the talented technical team launched the first version of the workflow management cloud product, built on Force.com, in 8 months. Their CEO, well connected in the technology world, brought in the first sales. They had 10 customers with around 120 subscribers in just 4 months. Although they were only collecting $20 per subscriber each month, things seemed upbeat. After all, they had the product already and all they needed were more customers. They projected adding 1500 subscribers in the next two years. They hired two more salespeople and began ramping up the back office team as well.

The trouble began when their customers started coming to them asking for more features. It seemed that another salesforce.com partner had also launched a competing offering. The startup had to act fast. Their technical team worked with the customers, compiled a list of all new features/functions required and came back to the CEO with the game plan. The underlying object model and design of the product would have to be changed to accommodate the new features. It would take around 6 months to develop and roll out. However, the catch was that there was no way to roll out an upgrade to existing customers due to the changes in the object model. Each existing customer would have to be migrated to the new version. Each migration for a customer was expected to take 3-4 weeks and would cost around $20k. By the time the new release would be ready, they estimated they’d have 80 customers to migrate, and would therefore need a significant chunk of change to fund that.

Ever the salesman, the CEO assured the team he’d be able to get the customers to pay for the migration. He went and talked to two customers about the plan. They would be getting all the fabulous new features in 6 months however, they’d have to shell out a one-time $20k fee for the new features. The CEO wasn’t prepared for the response. Why do we have to pay these fees for the new features? Doesn’t Cloud Computing mean that we pay you a monthly fee and you figure out the rest?? was the response he received. It became clear to him, after the first few conversations, that the customers wouldn’t pay anything for the upgrade. This was an unanticipated cost which threatened to completely destroy their business plan.

The example above is extracted from my recent book, Thinking of Force.com as your Key to the Cloud Kingdom, co-authored by Ian Gotts. The book, featured in CIO Magazine’s “What We’re Reading?” List for March 1^st, 2011, will help ISVs ask the right questions that are critical for commercial success in salesforce.com’s cloud.

Getting your financial model right is one of the biggest challenges. It’s very important to ask the right questions upfront, so you don’t get blind-sided.

Unrealistic ROI expectation

We’ve estimated that we should be able to sell 50,000 to 70,000 subscribers in 3 years, asserted the CEO of a start-up that wanted to build a Force.com app for a vertical market. They assumed that, with 70,000 subscriptions at a price of $125 per month, they’d bring in over $100 million in revenue in their third year. Pretty aggressive!

Now let’s look at the CEO’s cost model. To build their product, they had hired a programmer with 5 years experience who had dabbled with Apex in a previous job. The programmer had convinced the CEO that he could launch the first version of the app if he received some help from a skilled company in developing the more complex pieces. Together, they estimated the total cost of launching the product at $150k. This included the programmer’s salary. They assumed that once they had a basic version, the programmer would be able to continue enhancing it.

The overall estimated cost was $500k per year against revenue of $100 million. Do you see a problem with this model?

The example above is not fiction, it is painfully true. It is extracted from my recent book, Thinking of … Force.com as your Key to the Cloud Kingdom, co-authored by Ian Gotts. The book, featured in CIO Magazine’s “What We’re Reading?” List for March 1^st, 2011, will help ISVs ask the right questions that are critical for commercial success in salesforce.com’s cloud.

Getting your financial model right is one of the biggest challenges. The cost of building, maintaining, implementing, supporting, and upgrading all versions of your service will be much, much higher that you anticipate. You also need to be realistic about the number of subscriptions you will sell and the price and number of seats you will get.

The CEO, in the example, was right to get excited about the potential that cloud computing and Force.com offers. However, building a cloud app is not like winning the lottery. If you don’t ask the right questions up front to understand the cloud business model, you could be writing checks for years, without seeing any return.

Alok Misra

Building a consulting practice instead of a cloud product

I hold you responsible for not telling me earlier that this would cost so much, yelled the EVP of Product Development at the consultants that were helping him launch a cloud offering on Force.com. He was right about the cost spinning out of control. However, he and his team never really paid attention to the advice they were given. As far as the EVP was concerned, his team had been in IT product development for years and had the business knowledge as well as the technical caliber to pull it off. He wanted complete internal ownership of the project – the consultants were just there to help with a few tricky items on the fringes, so their advice was largely ignored.

Things started heading south after the first two potential customers continued to demand more features in the product before they paid a cent. Then came the expectations related to performance and more advanced features. The expectations kept mounting. Within the next few months, a significant number of the product team members got involved in figuring out how to meet the rapidly escalating demands from the first set of buyers.

Mired in product features and attributes, the product team didn’t realize that they were getting into a consulting role with their potential customers but, that was also something they weren’t trained to do. They didn’t know how to manage the scope of work or customer expectations. They had no idea how to push back so they continued accepting all demands and suggestions, turning the product scope into a constantly moving target.

The EVP went to the CFO for more funding and the executive team was appalled. They had already spent upwards of $2 million and it seemed like a bottomless pit with no revenue in sight anywhere. The executives pulled the plug on the entire initiative.

The example above is not fiction, it is painfully true. This is one of many organizations that thought that making money in the cloud model was easy – they spent all the money & effort but still ended up with less than they started with. The case study is from my recent book, Thinking of … Force.com as your Key to the Cloud Kingdom, co-authored by Ian Gotts. The book, featured in “CIO Magazine’s “What We’re Reading?” List for March 1^st, 2011“, will help ISVs ask the right questions that are critical for commercial success in salesforce.com’s cloud.

It’s important to ask these questions before before you go and spend too much money. It’s quite possible that after considering all the questions you may come up with the answer No. That’s a No to Cloud Computing, or No to Force.com, or Not now but possibly later. Any of these answers is fine.

What is important is that the decision has been made with due consideration.

Alok Misra

They aren’t wrong. Application integration, for instance, does require services. However, the cost of both middleware products as well as supporting services has been lowered significantly since integration became available as a service (ask Informatica). You will notice a similar trend with professional services in the cloud – they cost much less than professional services for on-premise software. In fact, traditional systems integrators have not yet been super successful in the cloud, primarily because it’s not providing them as much services revenue as on-premise software has been.

My point is that quite a few (but not all) of the professional services in the cloud are either costing much less (most people would agree with that) or are not required (since they are either redundant or available for free).

Let’s understand why. Cloud is a new technology but, unlike other new technologies, it’s a game-changer which drastically alters the existing business models. The new model forces cloud providers to provide certain services for free, so that they can keep customers long-term (this wasn’t needed in the on-premise world), not because it’s some gimmick (in fact, since the cloud model is subscription-based there isn’t any room for gimmicks – sustained customer satisfaction is of paramount importance). Just the way Starbucks provides internet for free, in the hope you will buy their coffee (and scones, which I like), but if you don’t, you still get something (internet and a decent environment to use it) for nothing.

All this is great news for customers of cloud apps. They will be the ones to benefit most.

Now, does this mean that there will be no professional services needed and all systems integrators will eventually go out of business? Not at all. There will always be areas needing services. There may still be a lot more consulting services required, for instance, to sort through the mess created by a proliferation of niche cloud providers. Systems integrators that provide application support may have to start focusing on providing that support to cloud providers, instead of companies. In summary, if you are a provider of professional services, cloud computing will force you to rethink your portfolio, value proposition and target customer base … at a minimum.

Alok Misra

It would be nave to assume that the Indian biggies would let a $48 Billion opportunity slip by them. So if they’re missing on the big stage, it isn’t because of lack of cloud engineering skills, it’s due to the commercial model. They probably feel the same as Tom Cruise in Jerry McGuire, demanding,  Show me the Money.

They’re still trying to figure out how to make money in this model. In the cloud, the deal sizes are typically very small. Depending on whether you’re selling products or services, it’s a very different model (See Products vs. Services in the Cloud). Also, most payments are made in hundreds/thousands (not millions) and delivery happens in hours/days/weeks (not years).

So the big Indian firms face two issues, when it comes to making money. Firstly, their size gets in the way, since they are very dependent on large commoditized services deals worth tens of millions of dollars each. Secondly, since the cloud offers their customers the ability to save money, those savings eat into the revenue these Indian firms can otherwise generate or, in other words, the cloud cannibalizes their services revenues.

Some firms, such as Infosys, have also begun pursuing a non-linear revenue model for reducing their reliance on project pricing based on heads involved in a project. However, I’m not sure if the non-linear model is targeted at getting a piece of the cloud pie.

To make money in the cloud, these firms would like the projects to grow in size as well as bring incremental revenue rather than eat into the current one. They will probably campaign against multitenancy. In other words, instead of them going to the cloud, they’d like the cloud to come to them.

It is therefore important to ask: who will be more successful in this marketplace for the foreseeable future? Smaller, nimbler companies without the hourly-billing baggage (see my post on Navatar Group) or the large legacy firms with big wallets.

Would love to hear your viewpoint.

Aurobindo Sarkar

Marty Gauvin: No, not at all. Virtual Ark can manage dedicated instances of the application for specific customer needs as if they were “one” application instance. In our view, the security, integration and performance requirements of our target market, large enterprise customers, are ill-suited to multi-tenant solutions. We think this is a key reason why SaaS has not been taken up more strongly by this market segment, and why many ISVs have not modified their applications to be multi-tenant. Virtual Ark sees this as an important differentiator in its value proposition.

Here was my response to this, at the Techo-Pulse site:

It may be hard to argue with Marty when he says large enterprise customers, are ill-suited to multi-tenant solutions. Large customers, usually, are too high-maintenance, both in terms of their unique requirements as well as their highly political environments. Had they been simple to deal with, consulting firms like Deloitte or PwC, that make most of their money from organizational complexities, would have gone out of business by now. No wonder, it’s hard for a vendor offering a multitenant solution to convince a large customer to buy.

So if you’re an ISV targeting large enterprise customers, an easier option may be not to be multitenant, so you can tailor for each customer’s unique needs. It’s a perfectly valid (and maybe lucrative) business model. The issue is that eventually you will turn into a services company or, in other words, most of your revenues will come from services (see my InformationWeek post Product Cloud Or Service Cloud? Know The Difference).

If you want to be a viable cloud vendor selling products (see my InformationWeek post Why Multitenancy Matters in the Cloud), you have no choice, your product must be multitenant in order to survive in the cloud world.

I think this debate about multitenancy will go on, as long as ISVs believe there are “quickie” routes to having a cloud product. I have covered this subject extensively in my new book : Force.com as your Key to the Cloud Kingdom.

However, Marty’s comments do raise other important questions: Is it possible to sell and maintain multitenant cloud products to large companies? Are there examples of companies doing that?

Would love to hear from you.

Alok Misra

If you’re part of a Government agency that engages volunteers, you may be interested in this recorded webinar from HandsOn Connect and salesforce.com:

Transforming Government Volunteer Management in the Cloud

In this webinar, you will learn how HandsOn Connect, the volunteer management solution that runs in salesforce.com’s cloud, helps agencies:

• Manage volunteers and volunteer opportunities
• Track projects, events, sponsors, and donors
• Host and manage your public-facing web site
• Access real-time reports and dashboards for decision support and impact tracking

HandsOn Connect is an out-of-the-box cloud product that requires no hardware or software. Since Navatar built HandsOn Connect, I participated in this webinar. One of the several good questions that an attendee asked me was: What is the advantage of managing volunteers through salesforce.com, as opposed to any other platform?

For answers to this and several other key questions, watch this webinar now:

Transforming Government Volunteer Management in the Cloud

Alok Misra

ALPS Fund Services is a big name in the Mutual Fund industry. It distributes Select Sector SPDRs and provides a full services suite for open-end, closed-end, exchange traded and alternative investment funds. Combined with ALPS Distributors, Inc., ALPS Fund Services services more than $240 Billion in client assets.

What ALPS gains with Navatar is Mutual Fund CRM and sophisticated sales reporting with transaction data from transfer agents and brokers, all delivered through the Navatar Cloud for a low monthly fee.

Why Navatar? ALPS Portfolio Solutions and Select Sector SPDRs, Regional Sales Manager, Jeff Brainard says, “We found Navatar’s Mutual Fund Cloud for Salesforce to be the most complete out-of-the-box product for our industry.”

Thanks Jeff. We look forward to helping Alps achieve record sales!

Allan Siegert

If we put the attrition issue (that I have to deal with) aside, the big positive in all this is that Navatar has become a trusted name not just for financial firms looking for SaaS solutions, but also companies seeking the most experienced and talented cloud resources.

As a recent addition to the Navatar team, here’s how I see it: When it comes to Force.com, we are considered one of the pioneers, after hundreds of deployments. We created one of the most complex commercial cloud products HandsOn Connect. Our thought leadership is reflected in our books (Force.com as Your Key to the Cloud Kingdom), whitepapers (Do’s and Don’ts of the transition to Cloud Computing), articles (Ten Common Mistakes Architects Make), webinars (Architecting Commercial Apps) and opinions (Why Multitenancy Matters in the Cloud). In addition to Force.com, we’re really into the cutting edge of cloud technologies such as Azure, Google Apps, as well as mobile platforms such as Android, when it comes to our engagements.

However, I believe what really sets us apart is that Navatar is truly a cloud product company. We are one of the top resellers of salesforce.com. In financial services, our Mutual Fund Cloud, M&A Cloud and Private Equity Cloud, dominate the market. Financial firms in more than 20 countries use the Navatar cloud service including firms such as Jefferies & Co, Carlyle Group and Guggenheim Partners. We pioneered the concept of cloud products where customers don’t pay anything for implementation or support services. And Navatar has done all of this without any outside capital and still stays cash-flow positive. We went through the recession without any downsizing or salary cuts.

The projects we execute and the products we develop are cutting-edge, and a hard act to follow. It is therefore not surprising that several of our alumni, that helped us start the NOIDA Cloud Computing Center, have expressed interest in returning. In addition, the good news is that talented engineers are beginning to reach out to us directly, as word about our success spreads.

As for me, retaining and expanding our extremely talented team is critical, as I begin the task of scaling a unique and proven cloud computing model. I must clearly outline what it means to work for a company with true cloud DNA. I have to help each of our current and prospective team members answer the question: Will I be better off getting a large brand name on my resume or becoming one of the leaders in the cloud computing revolution?

- Aurobindo Sarkar

Editorial Director Tom Steinert-Threlkeld says it is now possible to measure funds sales performance across various channels.
“Take Navatar. This is a buzzword-friendly service that works “in the cloud,” giving you access to tools for managing relationships with brokers, banks and financial advisers “on demand.” Alternately, you can consider it “software as a service,” running on top of a suite of services offered by Salesforce.com, which pioneered the concept of letting companies subscribe to online versions of computer programs which they didn’t have to install or maintain.

Navatar’s mutual funds add-on to Salesforce.com lets sales managers see aggregate sales data from different regions of the country or by broker-dealer firm or other overall measures. But it also breaks down sales to the transaction, so the performance of any individual rep can be tracked and evaluated.”

Navatar Mutual Fund Cloud is used by prominent firms such as Jefferies & Co., Guggenheim Partners, Alps Funds. It includes transfer agent data from DST, Sungard, Envision and others. It also includes intermediary feeds from Schwab, Fidelity, DST and others.

To learn more about Navatar Mutual Fund Cloud, visit:

http://sites.force.com/appexchange/listingDetail?listingId=a0N300000016cPkEAI

To read the full article, you can sign up for a free trial of this publication aimed at leaders in asset management http://www.mmexecutive.com/.

It is possible. After all, we’re all familiar with this story in the tech world – an upstart with a new technology starts stealing revenues from an established player, established player buys upstart, established player kills new technology and goes back to maintaining its dominance (Lauren Carlson of CRM Software Advice discusses some acquisition scenarios in her survey).

But before we start writing its epitaph, let’s consider this. Although salesforce.com introduced us to it, multitenancy isn’t a “product,” owned by one vendor – which makes it a little harder to be bought and killed. It isn’t just a cool architectural concept – customers reap real cost benefits because of multitenancy. Jefferies, for instance, would have to maintain 3 separate boxes to handle CRM, broker data and compliance for their mutual funds, versus the multitenant Navatar Mutual Fund Cloud, which helps them function without any boxes for a low monthly fee (for more on multitenancy’s benefits, see my Informationweek post Why Multitenancy Matters in the Cloud).

Multitenancy, however, has no shortage of enemies. Most legacy software vendors are beginning to lose money to smaller multitenant competitors. To protect their turf, these vendors jump into the cloud themselves but discover they don’t like the financial model (Oracle’s example discussed in my old post Oracle Cloud Computing and the CFO’s Dilemma). Their answer, then, is to have a cloud play without multitenancy?(yes, it’s possible if you can redefine what the cloud really stands for).

Even large systems integrators are no friends of multitenancy. As David Linthicum points out in his Infoworld post What cloud computing can and can’t do, consulting firms worry about losing the big bucks they otherwise make from enterprise architecture complexities. They don’t like to hear about any client efficiencies that may reduce their billable hours.

The question then is – with so many influential enemies, will multitenancy’s fate eventually turn out to be similar to Julius Caesar’s?

I don’t know. To survive, it will need many more customer ROI stories, more successful vendors as poster kids and a longer tail of cloud providers. Above all, it will need some influential champions with strong enough shoulders to carry the multitenancy flag.

As always, would love to hear your thoughts (you can read more about multitenancy in my new book Thinking of …Force.com as your key to the Cloud Kingdom, just reviewed by Sand Hill Group).

Alok Misra

So, the article starts off says we are openly attacking the vestiges of the on-premise software model because we are providing all implementation and support services for financial firms interested in salesforce.com, for free. We go on to say that our announcement promises to start a new trend among cloud product providers – free services. This is bad news for legacy software vendors who earn millions of dollars from implementation, maintenance and support fees. You can “read” the rest of the article at:

Multitenancy: The Next Cloud Computing Wave?

After Navatar made the announcement for free services for Salesforce, here are a just a few of several questions I received:

“How will you make money?”

“Free – Ha Ha...”

“Very interesting … still digesting what it means..”

The questions were genuine and?their underlying theme was clear – everyone seemed very?surprised since they didn’t think it was possible to provide any services free of cost. They were trying to figure out what the catch was.

There really is no catch. This is the way it is supposed to be in the cloud computing model. Cloud products are not physically installed for each customer the way on premise products are. True cloud products are multitenant and share databases, infrastructure and labor. Which means that the costs of implementing, maintaining, supporting and innovating can be shared too. That’s why, when you buy a cloud product you are supposed to get most services related to product implementation and support free of cost. It’s as simple as that.

All said and done, this is still a concept that will take some time to stomach – particularly, for folks that are like myself and have spent almost a couple of decades in the technology world, have long made a living implementing and maintaining software and have seen several fads come and go (I too spent years helping Deloitte and PwC make money on systems integration work). So their skepticism is understandable.

But there’s another category of doubters – those that have bought into the idea that implementing Salesforce for your business is simple enough to be accomplished with a few button clicks while playing poker. It’s often hard for them to see the value of what we offer (at least initially) since they are driven by the notion that it’s an easy DIY job. However, they typically realize after 6-12 months that the task of getting Salesforce to support their business, though not as daunting as plugging an oil well leak, can be extremely cumbersome and distracting.

So the answer is: No, we are not offering free lunches. Cost is one of the important advantages that Cloud Computing delivers – services costs are a big part of the TCO of software that the cloud promises to reduce. Real Cloud Product Companies will offer low cost subscriptions to useful, out-of-the-box (or, shall we say, out-of-the-cloud) products without charging customers for services – which is what we at Navatar are doing. The idea is that every Hedge Fund (or every Broker/Dealer or every Mutual Fund) doesn’t have to spend time and money doing the same thing just to implement and support software. Once customers see that value, they will be the real winners.

Alok Misra

Your Investor Relations team will not have to spend time preparing spreadsheets and performing complicated calculations. The pre-defined logic in the system computes the capital drawdown/distribution and fee allocations to various limited partners. The system also allows flexibility for exceptions – for example, the allocation for a limited partner can be overridden if their side letter states they don’t invest in certain countries or industries. The system also performs automatic rolls ups for each LP and fund, on various metrics, to help users manage the process efficiently.

The IR team will not have to manually create and mail capital call letters either. The Capital Calls functionality will, in a few easy steps, allow them to:

• Set up custom capital call/distribution email templates using the fund’s logo and branding
• Dynamically populate the capital call notice with relevant contacts, limited partner’s commitment and capital call/distribution information
• Identify the contacts across limited partners to whom the capital call/distribution notices need to be sent based on the limited partner’s preferences
• With a single click, email notices to all the relevant contacts across limited partners

We will continue to add more functionality to increase the productivity of your investor relations, fundraising and deal flow teams. If you weren’t aware, Navatar Private Equity CRM is built on salesforce.com’s cloud computing platform. Follow the link for a demo:

Demo of Navatar Private Equity

Shweta Kumar

Take the case of Netage, an established vendor that has been providing CRM to Financial Services. Netage will continue to lose deals to Navatar (read River Cities Capital Funds has selected Navatar’s Private Equity CRM over Netage Dynamo). The reason is simple: for a legacy vendor like Netage, winning the cost/value battle against a cloud provider like Navatar is next to impossible unless they can rethink their entire business model.

Legacy vendors typically give the cloud a try, as a defensive move – they launch a hosted offering, available through the internet to avoid losing business. They often try to save money by using all or some of their existing on-premise infrastructure and practice for their hosted offering (masked as a cloud offering), by avoiding the investment in a new technology infrastructure that supports multitenancy. However, the high cost of replicating and maintaining instances for each single tenant (or customer) eventually catches up with them, and their margins get lower as each new customer sucks up more resources (read Why Multitenancy Matters in the Cloud to learn more).

It isn’t just smaller companies – larger companies such as Oracle are faced with the same issue when it comes to competing with cloud providers (read Oracle Cloud Computing and the CFO?s Dilemma). But because of their size and scale, larger companies like Oracle have the ability to change the market demands/dynamics and fight the battle on a different turf.

The clock, in the meantime, is ticking for most other legacy software providers. If all they do is launch a cloud offering in addition to their on premise offering while maintaining the same business model, they will die soon. Their survival will depend on whether they can make a complete transition to the cloud world.

I think that you can offer Cloud/SaaS products as single-tenant, multitenant or both (meaning one model for Goldman Sachs and another for Peter’s Garage) and also label them the way you want … the main question is that of revenue and cost … or, more plainly, whether you will become a winner in your space in the long term.

The keywords are both “winner” and “space.” If most of your customers can be served through multitenancy, you will have a winning SaaS/cloud product since you will eventually win the cost/value battle over your competitors. If most of your customers, on the other hand, require customizations that make your model single-tenant you may eventually become a winner in the consulting/SI space but not in the product space (someone else will figure out how to offer a multitenant product at a lower cost).

It’s a well known fact that Marc Benioff’s early investors pressured him to also offer single-tenant versions of Salesforce and give customers a choice… we can all guess where salesforce.com would have been had he accepted that compromise. But let me also give you examples from experiences that I have lived (through Navatar).

Our cloud products for Financial Services on the Force.com platform are all multitenant. For instance, 70+ Private Equity firms that use Navatar’s Private Equity product run their own instances of salesforce (where the product is loaded), have made their own configurations (and customizations) however, they are still able to receive upgrades seamlessly from salesforce.com as well as from Navatar. That’s the architecture we were able to design (force.com surely helped). We sometimes have to stay away from potential customers who want heavy customizations that can prevent us from offering them seamless upgrades (even though we have a consulting practice) that’s a price we pay.

Another example: Our consulting practice specializes in building products (on Force.com) for others. One such product we recently built was for Points of Light Institute, a pioneer and leader in facilitating volunteering. They offered a client/server product to nonprofits, to manage volunteer activity within their community. The cost of maintaining and supporting their 300 customers/affiliates was too high and the model wasn’t scalable. The new Force.com-based multitenant product allows each customer to customize, create their own web pages etc, without losing the ability to upgrade to the next version (in development). However, it was the targeted saving of 50% in the cost of maintenance/support that made the move to the cloud worthwhile for them without multitenancy, instead of savings, they would have been building fatter maintenance and consulting practices.

Also, as someone pointed out, multitenancy is a necessary, but not sufficient condition for a profitable cloud product business – there are a whole bunch of others, and I complete agree. It’s also worth mentioning the blogs of those that actively participated in the debate and helped me enhance my own learning on all of this. Here are some of them that you may find interesting:

Customization: An enemy of SaaS, There goes the neighbourhood, Multitenancy in the Cloud, Principal-driven Customization, Trident Capital blog.

There is no doubt that Force.com, Salesforce.com‘s platform-as-a-service (PaaS), is the leading cloud computing platform today. If you are an independent software vendor (ISV) or an entrepreneur looking to build commercial products in a public cloud, it’s probably on your radar already. Force.com gives you the potential to save on development time and get a product to market faster–even more important, the potential to build a business with fewer resources.

Does that mean you can create a profitable cloud business by building your product on Force.com? The answer is–not necessarily.

In reality, most companies struggle to see the return on investment after all their development effort. Here’s why: In a perfect world, seat sales through the AppExchange would happen at the same rate that consumers download music on iTunes. Business buyers, however, are harder to reach and take forever to convince. Both traditional ISVs and startups usually discover they have been overly optimistic not only about how fast they can sell but also about what price targets they can achieve. To make things worse, ISVs find the product development, maintenance, and delivery costs to be much more expensive than anticipated.

Please join us to meet other Salesforce.com customers in the great State of New Jersey, network, to learn more about this important initiative as well as share your tips and best practices! Hope to see you there!

Date/Time: Wednesday, December 2, 2009  5:30 p.m. to 7:30 p.m.
Location: Princeton Overlook – Regus Business Center 100 Overlook Center, 2nd Floor Princeton Location Information

RSVP: njusergroup@gmail.com by Wednesday, November 25, 2009.

Agenda:

5:30 p.m. – Networking & Refreshments
6:15 p.m. – Introductions & Announcements
6:30 p.m. – Application Demo – Ketan Khandkar, Navatar Group

7:00 p.m. – New Salesforce.com Community Site Preview

Hope to see you there!

Ironically, this is happening at a time when it has never been easier for a Venture firm to switch to better systems with almost no effort. The same browser they use to search for news and research can also be used for the industry’s most sophisticated CRM. No hardware needed other than the laptops they are now using and access to the Internet.

Whether they use our service built on the force.com platform or on top of salesforce.com or some of the other services out there, you have to wonder why, during this time of great stress they are still trying to make do with Excel and Outlook. If it is cost that is holding them back, you really have to wonder. We have priced our service at about the price of a couple of cups of coffee a day on Wall Street. On top of that, our Marketing Department is launching a “buy one get one free” promotion.

If you are in one of these financial firms and suffering from the funding drought – maybe it’s time to think about improving your pumping equipment.

Is it true then, that our Financial Services solutions for Force.com are popular because they’re low cost? Of course. Navatar’s solutions to manage CRM, Operations and Portfolio for these firms are probably the most cost effective alternatives. They deliver on the Cloud Computing promise – to?lower costs and enable scalability as financial firms navigate the turbulent waters of today and prepare for the future. You can read about how Transparent Value, a Guggenheim Partners Company is achieving this, in the article, Asset Management Firm Moving Apps to the Cloud, written by Penny Crosman at Wall Street & Technology.

However, there is another important aspect to all of this. Around 60% of our financial customers bought from us since someone (another firm) recommended us. You would think the recommender probably said, “Yes, indeed, the cost is low and the product has all the features we need.” In reality, our recommenders endorse us for much more than that – they are happy to recommend us for the combination of product features and the service they receive from folks well versed in Financial Services. They like the idea of a one-stop-shop they can turn to, for anything related to running their operations efficiently. And it’s all baked into the cost of the service.

The service aspect really is the crux of the Cloud Computing model. A cloud service provider is a company that delivers cloud services as part of its business model. The public Cloud will be an abstract place through which service providers will deliver things like storage as a service, software as a service, or maybe even sushi as a service in Indiana one day. But the common link between all those things is, and ever shall be, the delivery of service. That quote is from an article Delivering Cloud Services: ISVs ? Change or Die or both! written byDaryl Plummer at Gartner.

So, let’s ask the question again. Is it really the cost?? My answer is that the big differentiator is the value that the Cloud Computing model enables us to provide. It makes us successful and it is exactly that value which will help our Financial Services customers take advantage of the new upcoming opportunities in this downturn.

Let’s tackle the first part of the question. It is, indeed, a huge shift, moving to a subscription based pricing model. Oracle probably has a twofold objective – to protect the current customer base (probably a bit easier because these customers have already spent millions on software/consultants and are seemingly ‘locked’ in) as well as acquire new midmarket customers that haven’t yet had a taste of Oracle’s software. Can Oracle potentially repackage what customers would have paid into annual license and ongoing maintenance fees into a monthly subscription fee spread over the life of the contract, and protect current revenues as well as get new customers?

I don’t think so. When it comes to midmarket, vendors more grounded in the SaaS world (or the multi-tenancy experts) will surely come with lower priced options and Oracle will have a tough time competing. The answer would have to be lower revenue per customer. Which means that just to produce the same revenue numbers, Oracle will need to acquire more customers. More customers implies more salespeople, more infrastructure, more support, more (you fill in the blanks). In summary, that means incurring higher costs but getting the same revenue. Safra Catz will not like that.

Which brings me to the second part of Mary’s question will Oracle need to invest heavily in a multi-tenant architecture to solve this? Absolutely. Multi-tenancy will be necessary to deliver cloud services and shift to subscription-based pricing, while protecting the bottom line at the same time. Yes, building and delivering that kind of architecture isn’t Oracle’s forte. But their industry and financial stature gives them so many interesting choices that it shouldn’t be that hard for them either. They could go and buy a company (and a platform) tomorrow. They could sell more database licenses to salesforce.com and then use Force.com as the platform to build and deliver multi-tenant versions of Oracle apps (Peter Coffee points out in his blog entry What the Cloud Entails? how increasingly complex multi-tenant apps are being built in a faster timeframe on Force.com). Or they could hire the best cloud talent and build the multi-tenancy infrastructure themselves.

Did I miss any other options that Safra has? I’d love to hear your comments. Oh, and of course, here’s a (free) whitepaper (from yours truly) that may have a useful point or two about the pitfalls and benefits of the subscription-based pricing world:

Whitepaper: The Dos and Don?ts of the transition to Cloud Computing

Jim also poses more great questions, such as:

“As the business relies more heavily on these new infrastructures, will they be able to hold up to high scale? Will the business folks really want to take on the tasks to maintain these processes and applications? Who is going to build the integration components to glue these new processes apps together? Will the business folks build and IT be stuck with the results? How does one make sure there is not rampant duplication of processes and applications?”

Another good blog post Force.com – CiO’s dream or nightmare? by Ian Gotts (who heads Nimbus Partners) also outlines some important implications for a CIO, in the new cloud world order.

I do agree with Jim and Ian about the change that’s looming. CIOs need to do some serious thinking and figure out how they’d add value. It seems to me that there’s clearly an anchor role that needs to be played so that all of this comes together within an organization. Take the example of large banks such as Citi or JPMorgan Chase. Retail banking and investment banking are two disparate business functions within each bank and neither function really cares what the other is implementing technologically. But someone would have to figure out how to get these two functions (and others) within a bank to play together so the bank can benefit from a coherent cloud strategy. I also think that that someone would most logically be the CIO (although large Cloud Service Providers may compete for that role in future – outsourcers want that role but they’re unlikely candidates in my view).

Ian provides some very good pointers for the CIO. Another great post when it comes to pointers, is from Thomas Bittman (also, from Gartner) titled If You Build a Private Cloud, Will Anyone Come. “We’ve got to get our IT people to stop thinking about products and technologies and even architectures first, and instead to focus on understanding their service requirements first,” says Thomas. I completely agree. Thomas advocates making ROI decisions based on SLAs and costs for each service, before getting mired in architectures.

I think this is a big paradigm shift for a CIO. But then, aren’t CIOs smart people? If I can figure this out, so can they. What may be harder for a CIO, though, is to change their IT organization to become more service-focused and less obsessed with ownership. If a CIO can pull off that change, he/she will be in the drivers seat. Otherwise they will open opportunities for others.

Wipro is, undoubtedly, a very smart company. So is Oracle. And it definitely makes sense for two smart companies to generate some headlines. However, that’s all I see in this news item – no more. We only wish moving a software company and their customers to a SaaS model was that simple. I would understand if they were talking about providing manpower to maintain an app at 50% of the cost (that is the core business of Wipro – providing cheaper resources in India for tasks that are commoditized). We, at Navatar Group, live and breathe this every day (we help software companies move to Force.com, salesforce.com’s Platform-as-a-Service).

So what is the big issue, you may ask? The most important issue is that SaaS is more than just a technical platform. It is a business model to help you provide a “service”. A software company will die sooner if they move their existing software to a SaaS platform in this fashion. They will cannibalize their existing revenue, tick off their salespeople, lose their customers to startups and will be writing checks forever to meet daily customer demands.

Cloud Computing is a paradigm shift. A software company mustn’t jump into the SaaS model just because it’s cool and everyone else is doing it or even because it’s 50% cheaper now. They will probably survive a bit longer if they stick to their core competency – selling a “product” as opposed to providing a “service”.

To learn more about the issues faced by large software vendors like Thomson Reuters and CODA that have done this successfully, download this free whitepaper:

The Dos and Don’ts of the transition to Cloud Computing

Alok Misra

Does the world really need another Online Event Registration system? Yes, the world needs an Online Event Registration system that is integrated with your salesforce CRM. Let me ask you this. Wouldn’t you want to track attendance in events, conferences, webinars or trainings, in your salesforce system? It would help you understand your customers and prospects for upselling, cross-selling or better service. Navatar’s Online Event Registration system built on Force.com Sites is completely integrated with salesforce.

Aren’t there other existing Event Registration systems that are already integrated with Salesforce? Sure, there are. The key difference is that Navatar’s Online Event Registration system runs on Salesforce.com’s cloud. In other words, it is completely native and is hosted on the Salesforce.com servers. You do not need any other hardware, software or integration solution. It is all done for you.

So how can the event registration system help me? Try to answer the questions listed below. If you find yourself answering yes to some of them, this system may be for you.

1  Publishing events: Do you want to, without IT’s involvement and with a few clicks, publish an event on your website, open it for registrations and then remove it after the event is over?

2  Event Marketing: Do you want to prepare a list of participants based on last year’s events attendees?? Do you want to further filter this list to filter out email opt-outs? Do you want to drive email marketing campaigns to send out mass email invitations?

3  Multiple Sessions: Do you want to manage multi-session conferences? Do you want to allow participants to register for multiple sessions within an event?

4  Multiple Discount Types: Do you want to allow for various kinds of discounts based on the number of registrants, type of registrant, and type of registration- full/partial?

5  Multiple Payment Types: Do you want to give the registrant multiple payment options to choose from? Do you want to provide online credit card processing?

6  Registration Confirmation: Do you want to automatically send out acknowledgement mails confirming event registration?

7  Event Attendance: Do you want to track attendance and no-shows for the event?

8  Private Events: Do you want a mechanism to facilitate online registrations for a private event that won’t be posted on your website?

9  Event Analytics: Do you want to run analytics to gauge an event’s success? Do you want to generate a list of confirmed attendees to prepare a seating chart? Do you want to know how many different types of meals to order for an event? Do you want to know the names of registrants for each session of your event?

If you want to learn more about the product, you can view an online demo.

For further inquiries, you can reach our sales team at sales@navatargroup.com or 212 461 2140. You can also write to me directly at skumar@navatargroup.com.

We find that an ISV usually realizes that moving to the Cloud isn’t optional, before they come to Navatar Group for help. The ISV doesn’t realize, however, that simply Cloud-enabling their On-Premise software won’t translate into a profitable business model. We recommend this book as a must-read for every ISV so you can make an informed choice between selling a product and providing a service, based on your customer needs and your ability to change. Answering the Smart Questions will provide a basis for a realistic cost benefit analysis as well as help you understand what will resonate with your customers and where you will need advice or partnerships.

You can buy the book at Amazon. The link is:

Thinking of … Offering a Cloud Solution? Ask the Smart Questions.

• Benefits of a native app
• Pure platform or extending SFDC
• salesforce editions that your product will support
• Force.com features that you will be using
• How to create a rapid prototype
• Benefits of Visualforce vs. Standard Page Layouts
• When to write Apex Triggers
• Reporting/analytics requirements
• Benefits of Sites and Customer Portal
• Incorporating Security Best Practices
• Maintaining your product
• Supporting your product

Learn from top Force.com experts Sati Hillyer, Force.com Evangelist, salesforce.com and Ketan Khandkar, Principal, Navatar Group. Also read the new article Architecting a Commercial App as well as Ten Common Mistakes Architects make when building a Force.com App.

View recorded webinar now.

How did he begin? By simply jumping in. Register for the Force.com Cloud Developer Challenge, happening now through July 31, 2009. By registering you will be able to submit your application for the challenge, and receive additional communications such as hints and tips.

Submit an application and you will receive a t-shirt (while supplies last) from salesforce.com. Impress us with innovation or creativity and you might be rewarded with an Apple MacBook Pro, iPod nano or touch. Who knows, you may also be on your way to becoming one of the top Cloud architects.

Go to the Force.com Cloud Developer Challenge to learn more.

Are you ready?

So, I guess, things are expected to change soon. I have been working at the grassroots level, selling to companies hand-in-hand with the salesforce.com Account Executives (if you weren’t aware, Navatar Group works closely with salesforce.com in India also). My own experience is that there’s still a lot of evangelizing that needs to be done to raise the level of general awareness and reduce the fears. I would imagine that the Cloud providers are already at work, getting the message out.

The next important issue that I think needs to be addressed is accessibility. Although the internet is penetrating deeper and India is only next to China on the mobile user count, infrastructure is still a major bottleneck in India. Because of that, we find that prospects here give very serious consideration to an offline version of any cloud service. I still don’t see a lot of infrastructure providers paying attention to the opportunity that the cloud may offer, particularly in the SMB sector. We got a real taste of this after we sold our Capital Markets salesforce product to R. K. Stockholdings, a leading broker-dealer in North India with over 40 branches in small and mid-sized towns.

The other big issue so far has been affordability. It is true that the Cloud model offers a less capital-intensive alternative for businesses. But Indians are always looking for better deals. Due to an abundance of technical talent in this country, businesses are not scared to assemble software on their own since they still see that as a cheaper option. Cloud providers have been offering some discounts. But, they need better pricing models based on demographics and usage patterns.

The good news is that VCs are beginning to take notice. Rajeev Kumar, VP Sales at Navatar was recently invited to present to top Indian VCs in Mumbai around the Cloud opportunity for ISVs. We just attended Salesforce.com’s first partner event in Bangalore. We are finalizing a cloud contract with a large Indian bank and have several others in the pipeline. I know it’s just the beginning but I’m very optimistic about the change.

Amit Chaudhary

Why? According to the article, It is not enough to just cloud-enable your software. You still have to deliver it as a service and that is simply not the business of most ISVs. So, you might have to change. Further, “some software vendors will either change their business entirely, or go out of business if cloud computing becomes the mainstream norm for delivery of systems.”

We agree. We at Navatar have been helping several ISVs (large and small), that have an existing On-Premise business, “cloud-enable” their products on salesforce.com’s Force.com platform-as-a-service. We find that, not surprisingly, most ISVs are convinced that simply migrating their product to a cloud platform would turn them into a Cloud Service Provider (CSP) or a Software As A Service (SaaS) provider. Since they do not understand the change required to shift from a product-based to a service-based model, their Cost/Benefit analysis for the effort is often flawed. As a result, they are able to SaaS-enable their product, but they struggle to make money on it.

For more on this subject, download a whitepaper that we recently wrote, at http://navatargroup.com/WhitePaper.html. You will learn about the experiences of ISVs such as Thomson-Reuters and CODA as well as opinions from Deloitte Consulting experts. The whitepaper is free.

Alok Misra

But, it’s clear that going “social” is the new bandwagon to jump on.

Below Marshall’s article there’s a big excerpt from The Facebook Era by Clara Shih, the head of social media alliances and product strategy at salesforce.com. The full (and really long) title of her book is, The Facebook Era: Tapping Online Social Networks to Build Better Products, Reach New Audiences, and Sell More Stuff.

According to one reviewer on Amazon, (Adam Smith,Bainbridge Island, WA), “The Facebook Era is a bleeding edge guide to how social networking portals such as Facebook can give astute businesses a leg up.”

We know a trend we see one. The “no software” folks are leading the charge into social media CRM selling.

Expect a tidal wave of new sales books coming out with titles like Strategic Conceptual Facebook Selling for Complex Sales.

Seriously though, we have just downloaded Shih’s book onto our Kindle2 and look forward to reading it during the commute home from Wall Street tonight.

Have a great day!

Allan Siegert

It will take some time before large companies start replacing MS Office. However as third parties create more commercial products in the Cloud that are tightly integrated with Google Gmail, docs, calendar etc, we may see more organizations considering the switch from Office to the Google platform. We will be testing the waters soon with Navatar’s Financial Services products for Force.com, taking advantage of the tight partnership between Google and salesforce.com.

Stay tuned!

Alok Misra

The product is designed to:

Manage prospective clients (both sell side and buy side)
Manage sell and buy side relationships
Manage fund sales
Conduct Due Diligence on Funds (Fund Managers)
Quickly and easily generate client reports and client metrics (dashboards)
Track CRM activity including calls, meetings and emails Mass mailings

Navatar Group has built this product on top of the force.com platform (it is 100% native to the salesforce.com programming). We are long-time salesforce.com partners headquartered in New York (44 Wall Street). We specialize in financial markets (hedge funds, fund of funds, mutual funds and private equity).

Allan Siegert