SM: What does a corporate department pay to use your service? RR: It depends on size. For the mid-market, meaning companies ranging from $5 million to $500 million in revenue, on average pay us $9,000 to $10,000 per year in annual subscriptions. The range can start as low as $3,000 per year and it could go
SM: I am assuming you raised a second round. When was that? RR: We then raised a second round of $12 million. That was in the fall of 2000. It was only eight months later. Our valuation increased during that time by five times.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.