By Phil Wainewright
PW: Well Rand, of course, we've been having these conversations for more than ten years, since back to the dark old days of SaaS — when it was called ASP, and no one really believed that you could run software and applications in the cloud.
RS: That's right. Well certainly, all of our heads were sort of in the cloud, all the early guys' heads were in the clouds back then. And now, it's kind of funny that we're calling it cloud. As you know, we started talking when [my then company] brought out the first web analytics application, KeyLime Software, that was eventually sold to Yahoo and we were an ASP. We've come a long way since then.
At that point, we were serving a multitenant software product to users, and they could literally flip the switch on. A lot has changed, obviously, the success of Salesforce, Successfactors, Omniture, WebSideStory and others that I've been involved in, in the, quote, ASP or software-as-a-service business for ten years.
So what I wanted to talk about today a little bit was content-as-a-service. A lot of people are talking about platform-as-a-service. I wanted to give some more explanation about what content-as-a-service is.
Yeah, because one of the things I think that is very interesting about InsideView is the way that it is not just a software application, but it's also taking content as well, and delivering content-as-a-service in a way that is timely and relevant for the salesperson. When they need to work out which is the best customer for them to call next, or what should they say when they call the customer, InsideView really pulls information off the web and off social media that people can use, doesn't it?
That's right. What's happening today, unfortunately for the newspapers' sake, is content has become absolutely commoditized. And the content 1.0 vendors — companies like OneSource and Hoover's — who use people to create the editorial, they're going the way of dinosaurs. Facebook, LinkedIn, Zoom Information, InsideView, Jigsaw, we're all able to utilize content-as-a-service to get the rich set of content out there, and to present it to sales and marketing people when they need it — that is at the time of the sale so that they can increase conversion; where they need it, mashed up right into a CRM application; and to provide that relevance in this explosion of content to that end user — that sales and marketing end user — at the right time.
So how does this work? Can you give me a real-life example of how a salesperson might use this?
Yeah. We are involved with a new set of companies. They're really Sales 2.0 companies. And Sales 2.0 companies are bringing more of a science to what was previously sales as more of an art. And let me give you an example. We talked about this explosion of content. And the explosion of content really yields wrong information, a loss of time and a lack of relevance. So if a sales guy wanted to try to reach me, let's say, as a marketing person, one could go to the web and do a basic Google search on me and you will find that I am at five or six different companies.
And so what is the salesperson to do? So what InsideView does is, we use our entity triangulation and our natural language processing to produce a smart record. That smart record takes a look at all of the content that's out there — much of it wrong — takes a look at all that content out there and provides relevance to that content, so that that sales guy knows how to reach me and when I changed from, let's say, one company to another.
Right. Okay. So really what you're doing is — there's still a lot of algorithms and software technology involved there — but you're applying it to the content and then delivering — or filtering the content, really — to deliver useful information to the salesperson.
That's right. If you think back 15 or 20 years, Michael Bloomberg created the Bloomberg terminal. So as the Bloomberg terminals are to traders, SalesView, our application, really is to sales and marketing professionals — where we are aggregating relevant information, putting it in front of those traders — or sales and marketing people and — where those people can get the conversion that they need.
And of course, it's a mash-up isn't it? What you've done is you've taken the software but you're also taking these information and content feeds and mashing up all of that information and intelligence to deliver a result. So that's very much a Web 2.0 concept that you've applied in the product — or the service, rather, I should say — that you're bringing to market.
Yeah, that's right. The term mashup is another one of those terms that people throw around. We have actually two ways that we're mashed up. We bring all of this rich set of content, this information, directly to the users and we're mashed-up in the first way directly in a CRM application. We currently are supporting six CRM applications — we announced NetSuite last week — and they include Salesforce, Sugar, Oracle, Microsoft Dynamics and Landslide. So we're mashed-up both physically in the page, right in the middle of that CRM page. But we're also mashed-up in terms of data, so that our data is completely synchronized with the data that you have in your CRM application.
I mean that's great, actually — and that's the thing about SaaS, that we've got to with this SaaS revolution now — that the old way of doing this would be, the software vendor delivers the software package. And it's like a toolkit, where the customer has to engineer all these links into all these information services that they sign up to individually — and then integrated into the other applications they are using on premise — and maybe a year or two later, and coachloads of consultants later, they actually have something that might deliver something like the result they originally envisioned. Whereas here you are, you bring it in and it's already integrated, it already has the stuff there and people can just get on and do the job.
That's right. So we're able to further yield relevance to the content out there — and we're actually looking at the content or the content vendors as almost content cartridges, where we can plug in these content cartridges to our bus that can easily delete and add new content cartridges. And through our APIs, we're also looking — because we have the ability to mash up, because we're a content-as-a-service cloud application — we're looking to push this aggregated content out to other applications, and embed this application in other, let's say, marketing applications or vertical applications — legal applications, financial applications, health applications — where we just show up in those applications as well.
Source:ebizQ.net
