With the huge spike in demand for Clearspace since we launched in February, the demand for having it delivered as a service has been increasing even more substantially. About a year ago, 10% of our pipeline was for hosted opportunities; today, it’s closer to half.
While we have gained a lot of Software as a Service (“SaaS”) experience over the last few years, the application has not been fully optimized for a hosted environment and we have had to dedicate a lot of resources to maintenance and support, thus making it more expensive for us and our customers.
As others in the software industry have seen, demand for enterprise products delivered via a SaaS solution has extended to large companies, who just a few years ago had a mandate to bring everything in house. As such, we needed a leader to take our SaaS side of the business to the next level, in terms of architecture, product management, SLAs, team, infrastructure and more. Enter Eric Butler, our new VP of Hosting Solutions.
Eric joins us from WebTrends, another Portland company, where he wore various hats over his eight year tenure designing, engineering, building and managing their world-class On Demand environment. He has a wealth of experience and a strong desire to make things happen here at Jive.
Eric has expressed an interest in participating in JiveTalks as well, so expect to see more from him soon. For now, please welcome him to the team and know that his hiring represents a commitment on our part to better support our existing customers, and provide future customers with a means to start using Clearspace in a friction-free, dedicated environment.
Comments
This post has 7 comments. We encourage you to please post your own!
gray williams
Oct 15, 2007 at 12:27:45 PM
A.) You have a product that we should be using as opposed to email and a limited intranet - assuming we could learn to use it, and give it enough structure/security to make it meaningful.
B.) We have +100 IDC's and a global managed hosting platform for specifically this sort of thing...you shouldn't need to build your own.
We should probably talk. 703.798.7455
Eric Butler
Oct 18, 2007 at 10:01:34 PM
Thanks Gray. I'll give you a call to discuss.
Regards,
Eric Butler
Chuck Hollis
Oct 19, 2007 at 9:56:16 PM
The investment in SaaS offerings is probably a difficult, but correct decision.
My view is that corporate IT will usually not be your friend with "social productivity" applications.
I've found hundreds of potential community owners who have enough budget and interest to set up a Clearspace community - if and only if -- they can do it within their budget constraints -- and -- if Clearspace provides the 'assist' to getting them started and ramped over the learning curve.
I hope this works out for you guys.
Chuck Hollis
Oct 19, 2007 at 10:01:36 PM
My impression is that the industry is near a point where there are more than few folks who want to move ahead on this stuff, but aren't quite sure what to do, or how to think about the problem.
So, at some point, you all are going to have to tackle the difficult problem of establishing an authoritative voice in the community of people trying to figure out the very simple human problem of "what to do".
As you might know, I blog a bit on this subject (http://chucksblog.typepad.com/a_journey_in_social_media/) and I have been inundated with people who are looking at the same issues that I have been considering in regards to implementing a corporate social media capability.
No easy answer here, but people are looking for an authoritative voice.
If you can fill the need, I think you win.
Eric Butler
Oct 20, 2007 at 4:49:48 PM
Hi Chuck, thanks for the comment. We believe it is the correct decision too. We see our future SaaS solution as a huge enabler for organizations big or small to quickly and easily get started down the social productivity path.
-Eric
Dave Hersh
Oct 21, 2007 at 1:52:00 PM
Thanks for the comments, Chuck. And thanks for all the help and input you've been giving our team. They've been keeping me briefed.