On The Way To 100 Million Dollars In SaaS Revenue: Vocus CEO Rick Rudman (Part 4)

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.

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.