More SaaS: Concur, Taleo, RightNow

Concur, the expense management software maker, released its earnings for the second quarter of 2008. Subscription revenue growth was the main driving force behind their robust earnings. The company posted net income of $4.5 million or $0.09 a share, compared with $1.8 million or $0.04 a share in the corresponding quarter last year. Total revenue is

Read Full Article »

Top 10 Web Entrepreneur Interviews

I have done numerous interviews with entrepreneurs on this forum. Here’s a list of 10 Web entrepreneur interviews that I think have the most interesting strategy discussions on how each of them are building their companies:

Building an Ambitious SaaS Company: Taleo CEO Michael Gregoire (Part 13)

SM: What is your take on the Street’s understanding of how to analyze SaaS companies. Why are SaaS companies down so much? MG: It is coming around. I think SaaS gets put in the same bucket as tech. Right now there is a lack of visibility and understanding of how the future is going to

Read Full Article »

Building an Ambitious SaaS Company: Taleo CEO Michael Gregoire (Part 12)

SM: How many engineers worked on the new product? MG: We don’t break out how many engineers work on what products. SM: The reason I am asking that question is more intelligent than it sounds. SaaS companies have a big operational overhead to come to market and get established, but then additional products are not

Read Full Article »

Building an Ambitious SaaS Company: Taleo CEO Michael Gregoire (Part 11)

SM: Which international markets are you seeing adoption in? MG: We are probably the number 1 provider in Australia and New Zealand. We are in the top 3 in France and the top 5 in the UK. Momentum everywhere is going up. From a revenue perspective, we grew revenue by 32% to $128M. In applications

Read Full Article »

Building an Ambitious SaaS Company: Taleo CEO Michael Gregoire (Part 10)

SM: What is your channel strategy? Direct in the enterprise, Telesales for SME? MG: Very close. At the enterprise it is a direct sales force, distributed globally. In SME, it is telesales, our own telesales team. We have a lot of partners we do business with where we get a fee for transacting through our

Read Full Article »

Building an Ambitious SaaS Company: Taleo CEO Michael Gregoire (Part 9)

SM: What is your business model? What is the pricing model? MG: The pricing model in the enterprise space, for companies with more than 3,000 employees, is that we charge by the number of employees in the company. It is not a transactional pricing system. We use multi-year contracts; most of them are three years

Read Full Article »

Building an Ambitious SaaS Company: Taleo CEO Michael Gregoire (Part 8)

SM: In the way the product is marketed, are you also competing against job boards such as Monster? MG: No, they are more partners of ours. We have direct linked feeds to most of the job boards. If a company decides to approve a requisition, they can hit a button in our system and it

Read Full Article »