Dear Friends & Colleagues in the Cloud:
We applaud the ServiceMax team on the $915M acquisition by GE Digital; the largest cloud acquisition in Q4 2016. We are honored to be an investor and to have shared in the journey of ServiceMax, the world’s leading cloud field service software company.
As we congratulate Athani Krishna, Hari Subramanian and Dave Yarnold on an incredible journey from a small team to a company that revolutionized the global field service industry, we want to highlight three important foundational elements that ServiceMax and other Enterprise Cloud global market leaders share at the early stage.
Domain Expertise
Having worked in the field service software industry since the 1990s, Athani and Hari are
examples of founders with deep domain expertise. This expertise brings a unique understanding of customer needs and challenges, enabling the design and development of meaningful and valuable products that the market embraces.
Leverage the Right Cloud Platform
Cloud platforms such as Salesforce, Amazon Web Services, Azure, and Google are enabling unprecedented growth and serviceability of global SMB and enterprise customers for cloud-based businesses. ServiceMax was the first field service management application built on the Salesforce platform, and one of the earliest mission-critical enterprise cloud applications.
The Classic Series A Financing and The Right Early Executive Hires
After building the early product, the founders needed to raise capital and grow their team with the right go-to-market executives. In 2008, while at Emergence Capital, Matt Holleran sourced and championed ServiceMax’s $2M Classic Series A financing. He was the original Salesforce VP AppExchange & Force.com ISV Partners and was uniquely qualified to see ServiceMax’s $18B global market opportunity and its fit for the Salesforce platform. As a Series A board member for ServiceMax, Matt added value on multiple levels, particularly in the recruitment of early key executives.
Helping recruit early executives is one of the most valuable forms of assistance a venture firm can provide a very early-stage cloud business application company. Matt leveraged his former experience as the first sales and marketing executive at a start-up software company with no customers to help recruit two early executives for ServiceMax; executives who possessed the right background and style to make an extraordinary impact on the company.
Dave and Charles have longstanding relationships with Cloud Apps Capital Partners, having both worked with Matt at Clarify and Datasweep respectively. At our firm, we hold in esteem the value of our relationships with our network and endeavor to identify opportunities like the early ServiceMax hires.
The Rise of the Enterprise Cloud Business Model
ServiceMax is an excellent example of mission-critical enterprise business applications moving into the cloud, and is the inspiration of our firm including the Classic Series A investment and value-add model. At Cloud Apps Capital Partners, we are honored to be the lead Series A investor in the next great Enterprise Cloud company Propel PLM, a cloud product lifecycle management company.
Congratulations again to the ServiceMax team. For more information on the ServiceMax acquisition or the next wave of mission-critical cloud business applications, we invite you to view Forbes Billion-Dollar Startup ServiceMax Sells To General Electric For $915 Million, our 2014 Dreamforce Presentation on the Enterprise Cloud Model, and Propelplm.com, or connect with us – we’d be happy to talk cloud business applications with you.