Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Mark Mader, CEO of Smartsheet (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: Let me suggest something else as well. You know there’re so many cloud apps right now. It’s becoming very fragmented and there is a large number of point solutions all over the place. With an enterprise company with lots of resources, you can potentially avail of integration resources to manage all these and to coordinate and link things up. There is also a huge amount of cloud services and applications consumption in the small business category. There, the resources just do not exist to be able to stitch all these things up and to integrate. What is your view of that world?

>>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Mark Mader, CEO of Smartsheet (Part 6)

Mark Mader: Then, there was the promise in native app development that went, “Why don’t you build it with a framework and the framework can propagate your app to all these different device platforms?” That failed miserably. The performance did not meet client’s expectations for almost every provider who tried that. Ten people said, “What’s the promise of HTML 5?” That also failed. User experience level was not high enough. We’ve gone from a web app world to where people’s expectations on solutions being, “I want a compelling web experience plus I want a compelling native app experience so that I can access, update, and share my information from wherever I am.”

>>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Mark Mader, CEO of Smartsheet (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Given that’s your sweet spot, whom do you consider as your direct competitor?

Mark Mader: By far in a way, the largest direct competitor remains the traditional spreadsheet. There’s not any other SaaS provider today that uses our form factor – the spreadsheet grid that we present in a collaborative way. When you look at the other markets right now – whether it’s email automation, surveying, CRM, or file sync and share – most of them have multiple participants. Look at Box, Dropbox, Google Drive, or SkyDrive, you could just go on and on about all the competitors in those specific niche categories. I think what happened in our category was people conceded the market to Google and Microsoft. When in fact, there was a huge opportunity to innovate on something that is 20 years old in concept. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Mark Mader, CEO of Smartsheet (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What use cases are you finding adoption in?

Mark Mader: The marketing operations is a big center of gravity within our businesses. They typically have many touch points within an organization who are responsible for either bringing something to market or managing the development of something. They’re usually the coordinators. When we look at the personas within our customers, they are very distinct users. Some of them are people who initiate process but they don’t invite anybody. Others are >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Mark Mader, CEO of Smartsheet (Part 3)

Mark Mader: The second piece is a fundamental shift away from how Google Spreadsheets and Excel store their data. When we think about work and tracking items, we don’t think about it as a collection of cells as you have in a spreadsheet. We think about it as a unit of work. A row within our world represents a unit of work whether it’s a task, contact, or candidate. These are all things that exist within our applications. We’ve found that while people like the simplicity and flexibility of spreadsheets, what very often happens was when they shared those with others, people would make changes that were very unpredictable. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Mark Mader, CEO of Smartsheet (Part 2)

Mark Mader: One of the categories that really took quite some time to move was one of the biggest ones, the Office Suite. As we look at all the different categories that are forming today, many of them have direct analogs to the pre-cloud world. One of the things that we found fascinating was that as Office was trying to figure out what its life in the cloud was going to be, there were two big companies that were going to help shape that. Microsoft being the obvious one and the other one was Google. They are working to bring the traditional Office Suite and the components of Office – Word, Excel, and PowerPoint – to the cloud.

What we found, as a huge opportunity, was if Office was going to be reinvented in the modern day with these mobile devices in the cloud, would it really look as Office was defined 20 years ago? >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Mark Mader, CEO of Smartsheet (Part 1)

This conversation takes our coverage of the cloud-based productivity space further.

Sramana Mitra: Mark, let’s introduce our audience to yourself as well as Smartsheet.

Mark Mader: I’m the CEO of Smartsheet. We are a Software-as-a-Service provider that serves about 40,000 businesses today in over 150 countries. The category of solution that we provide is enabling teams and businesses to collaborate on work and projects more effectively. That sounds like a very expansive category but in essence, it is one that is going through tremendous change right now as individuals and companies are trying to figure out how to adjust to working in a networked, cloud-based model. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Lou Guercia, CEO of Scribe Software (Part 5)

But I would think that there’s tremendous opportunity for entrepreneurs to kickoff very specific use cases within an industry or between a couple of technologies and build complete solutions. For example, something around the idea of connecting SMS types of technologies to other forms of broad-based marketing such as email, analytics between SMS campaigns, and web analytics. >>>