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.