A SaaS CEO’s perspective

I noted last month (see Valuing SaaS businesses) that a couple of UK construction collaboration technology providers were speaking at the SIIA OnDemand Europe conference in Amsterdam, alongside representatives from Adaptive Planning and Huddle.net. If you’ve got the stamina, you can view a 38-minute video of one of the sessions here; here’s a few points I picked out.

The session includes a debate about per-user pricing between 4Projects’ MD Richard Vertigan and Asite‘s CEO Tony Ryan (Tony justified its user pricing approach partly down to its range of different solutions, some of which lend themselves more readily to per-seat licensing approaches as opposed to per-project pricing, and partly where its end-users might be deploying Asite solutions across multiple projects, effectively reducing the associated unit costs).

Richard said he is committed to SaaS on a multitenancy approach, and said this proved very attractive when it was looking for investors in the run-up to 4Projects’ MBO last year. Having proved the concept, it looked for more cash to expand into new markets (energy and natural resources, he mentioned), to grow internationally, and to build more SaaS capability into customers’ legacy systems.

Tony also said Asite would shortly be launching a whole new website concept, building on web 2.0 (“Sales and Marketing 2.0,” he called it). Can’t wait to see what this looks like!