On The Way To 100 Million Dollars In SaaS Revenue: Vocus CEO Rick Rudman (Part 3)

SM: Was it a software-as-a-service offering? RR: When we launched the product in 1997, we did it on the desktop. There was no SaaS model back then. We sold it as a desktop application from 1997 to 1999.

On The Way To 100 Million Dollars In SaaS Revenue: Vocus CEO Rick Rudman (Part 2)

SM: Why did the deal fall through? Sounds as though they had commitment issues. RR: We never got a good answer regarding their rationale for cancelling the deal.

On The Way To 100 Million Dollars In SaaS Revenue: Vocus CEO Rick Rudman (Part 1)

Rick Rudman is the co-founder, CEO, president, and chairman of Vocus. Prior to founding Vocus he was one of the co-founders of Dataway Corporations, which developed software applications for large corporations. He earned a degree in accounting after spending four years in the Air Force and is an adjunct professor at the University of Maryland.

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Servicing IT: ServiceNow CEO Fred Luddy (Part 7)

SM: Are there even any companies out there that have technologies worth acquiring that are in what you term the ERP for the IT market? FL: Some, but not too many. Companies such as Hewlett-Packard and Computer Associates made done dozens and dozens of acquisitions. They would approach the ERP for the IT field with

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Servicing IT: ServiceNow CEO Fred Luddy (Part 6)

SM: Your company has been disruptive to the marketplace, which has forced your competitors to change their entire business model to address your success. FL: Exactly. It’s similar to when Southwest came on the scene and dropped a whole new way of doing business for airlines into the market. We have a very different model.

Servicing IT: ServiceNow CEO Fred Luddy (Part 5)

SM: I talk with a lot of CIOs. They tell me that 25% of their architecture is cloud computing. How does the role of the service desk evolve in that scenario? FL: As these customers start to move more and different apps into the cloud, they still have to manage those applications and the vendors. 

Servicing IT: ServiceNow CEO Fred Luddy (Part 4)

SM: Who was your first enterprise customer? FL: We had a couple of big customers very early. Edmunds.com was a big customer of ours, as was Qualcomm. TIAA-CREF was another. Those companies became a beachhead for us to get follow-on customers such as Hyatt.

Servicing IT: ServiceNow CEO Fred Luddy (Part 3)

SM: Did you bootstrap ServiceNow? FL: In the beginning it was completely bootstrapped. I had a couple guys volunteering who worked on nights and weekends, and that helped me out. However, it was really just me and a dozen customers at that point.