Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Larry Augustin, CEO of SugarCRM (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Let me comment a little bit on what I’ve heard so far, and then we’ll double-click on a few things. Firstly, this notion of your competitors in the industry not focusing on the sales people and how the customers are facing people—this is the whole notion of social CRM that has come about. Everybody is paying attention to that. Today, people know and believe that you want to dig and ask somebody to introduce you if you want to get into an account as opposed to cold calling somebody.

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Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Larry Augustin, CEO of SugarCRM (Part 1)

We covered John Roberts’ Entrepreneur Journeys story in December of 2008. In this story, we explore the cloud CRM industry’s evolution with Larry Augustin, who replaced John as CEO on May 6, 2009.

Sramana Mitra: As you know, we have covered SugarCRM quite a bit before. So our audience does start off with some knowledge of the company. I’d like to start us out by asking you, now that we are in a mature phase of the cloud computing industry – and CRM on the cloud especially is in a very mature stage – what does your ecosystem look like? Who goes for what solution and why? Who chooses SugarCRM and why?

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Bootstrapping a $175 Million Business with Services: TEOCO CEO Atul Jain (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: What happens next?

Atul Jain: Since then, we have become a global company. Today, we are about 1,300 employees and doing about $175 million in revenue. We are global with 50% of our revenue coming from outside of North America.

Sramana Mitra: Your target customer base is still telecom?

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Bootstrapping a $175 Million Business with Services: TEOCO CEO Atul Jain (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What year are we talking about?

Atul Jain: We did our first acquisition in 2006 when we were around $20 million. Over time, we have done five acquisitions and this year, our revenue is going to be about $180 million.

Sramana Mitra: So in 2006, you bring in another $5 million of revenue with an acquisition and then you launch this analytics product into your existing customer base. What did that do to your revenue?

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Thought Leaders in Healthcare IT: Girish Navani, CEO of eClinicalWorks (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: I experienced this with my grandmother about five years ago. This was in India. She was in a coma essentially and she was not responding. It was about 18 days. We would have been happy to let her go but no one would let us do that. She was 87 years old.

Girish Navani: I won’t say it’s easier, but some of them are more rational. I don’t know about this one because I have actually struggled with it internally. I like to tout the idea of health and wellness and I have somehow tried to avoid such situations. Maybe the person inside me doesn’t know how to react when faced with a decision like this myself. I would always say that if it’s better for the patient in terms of pain and outcomes, then it’s an easier one. If it is not, then which way do you go?

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Thought Leaders in Healthcare IT: Girish Navani, CEO of eClinicalWorks (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Is there anything else that you want to discuss?

Girish Navani: I think we will see a different healthcare system where the payer is not necessarily the one clearing a bill without telling you someday what it costs. I’ll tell you something new that we’re doing next year. We just went live with it inside our company. I think there’s a business model for it outside of eClinicalWorks. We mandated that our insurance company give us our claim files, which was a tough one to get. It got to a point where it was frustratingly being ignored. They would say, “I don’t have it today. I’ll give it to you day after tomorrow.” It went on for about four months until it came to a point where I said, “Either I get it or I’m going to another company.” We got our files then.

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Thought Leaders in Healthcare IT: Girish Navani, CEO of eClinicalWorks (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: They have other roles to play in medical imaging. In the equipment sector, they’re big.

Girish Navani: Yes, not in healthcare IT. This is the fun part and also the nerve-wracking part. As an entrepreneur, you have no fear because you have nothing to lose.

Sramana Mitra: Given your structure, what are your thoughts about acquisitions? One way that people deal with that threat is to bring in people from the bottom.

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Domain Knowledge Drives SaaS Unicorns

We’ve looked at a number of Unicorn companies so far: Tableau, FireEye, RightNow, Palo Alto Networks,Kayak, SuccessFactors, and Marketo. Today’s featured company is ServiceNow.

Fred Luddy, the founder, was a classic nerd. After meandering his way through various companies as a programmer, he ended up as the CTO of Peregrine Corporation that built software for the help desk and service desk markets. Peregrine acquired numerous companies and eventually grew to $500 million in revenues, but filed for bankruptcy due to accounting irregularities in 2003.

Fred, however, developed domain experience with the IT service desk market through that process. He decided to start a SaaS company in that space. >>>