VentureBeat

Dylan Salisbury said:

Anthony, you and Dean only get a “C” for summarizing the story here. From what you wrote, I would have assumed he was talking about how an SaaS company takes care of the data its customers enter into the site.

But he is actually talking about the data SaaS companies have on how each customer uses the SaaS offering itself.

Please don’t make readers listen to audio clips in order to understand the main point of the story — that’s. Your audience* has limited reading time, and the value added by multimedia is to allow us to dig deeper on the few posts that really catch our attention.

*Especially the readers who are most valuable to VentureBeat.

Anthony Ha said:

@Dylan Salisbury Sorry, yeah, I can see how that was needlessly obscure. I’ve reworded it; hopefully it’s clearer now.

Your larger point about multimedia content is a good one too. We’re all primarily print guys, so please bear with us as we figure out the best ways to incorporate all this other stuff.

Alex said:

Interesting clip. I’m not sure I totally agree with Gordon. He claims that SaaS companies will be valued on the data archived not the tools they sell(solution). If this is true then he is suggesting that real revenues don’t amount to much and that data mining is the real value.
The challenge for Gordon and the Emergence team is that the SaaS model is starting to get fragmented into many widgets and these widget companies don’t require boat loads of capital to grow their business. For example, look at Genius.com. This is a cool offering that adds value, but, there are two other companies in the market today that are offering a similar application for free. The saving grace for Genius.com is that these two companies are NOT targeting businesses per se, rather, blogs. What happens if GOOG buys one of these two companies for a song and then packages it up with GOOG analytics which is free?

Umberto Milletti said:

Gordon is a smart guy, and he points out the clear trend. The APPLICATION (workflow app, search box, travel site) is valuable only as it’s a conduit to the INFORMATION.

Apps are becoming commodities. Relevant information is what makes people smarter/better, and there lies the value.

It’s true in the consumer world, and it’s becoming true in the business/corporate world.

Ranjit Nayak said:

Gordon’s observations are bang on target. SaaS companies have this built in feedback mechanism of how their customers are using the product. Clearly SaaS vendors who figure out how to track feature usage and decipher the information will add value by improving the offering for their customers. This inturn will increase adoption and retention of customers which is critical for SaaS vendors.

Emmanuel Marchal said:

Good point made by Gordon.

Though while you can argue that the tool is becoming less and less important (after all it is easy to build a site to display data), i think the current trend puts a healthy pressure on companies using SaaS as a delivery method to really master the art of 1-converting raw data into useful actionable information for their end users (for booking sites, there is no point of having thousands of hotels in your db if you can’t correctly recommend the right ones to your end users), 2-data mining the raw data to roadmap new features of their platform (the case of google analytics… but while google analytics provide great transparency into your end users behaviours, there is still quite a step to figure out how to use this data…).

As Gordon puts it at the end of the audio, valuation is less about the tool value and more about the services value and I agree with this that companies understand who to create a service from raw data will continue leading.