Ceo Raphael Laguna offers a keynote at the company's Summit in Cologne, Friday
(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — The second keynote at Friday’s Open-Xchange event in Cologne was delivered by the company’s CEO, Raphael Laguna, who began by offering a bit of company history, focusing on how the company turned a corner in 2006 by choosing to build an email platform for the cloud.
The company released the first version of the product, in partnership with 1&1 Internet, in 2007. The following year, the company made the pretty innovative (at the time) move of incorporating a lot of social media information into the platform. In 2010, he says, the company’s user base really increased, up to 24 million users, based on the success of some of Open-Xchange partners.
That’s one of the reason’s that the company intends to stay a small company (it has 70 employees), and remain a partner, rather than do any of the hosting itself.
Laguna says the company has also learned that within the application is one of the best places to sell things – for instance, selling spam protection within the email application. This inside-the-app upsell has the power to generate huge new revenues for partners, he says.
A big difference, he says, is that by selling within the app, you’re not just selling to admins, you’re selling to the end users.
He showed a slide (that wasn’t connected to any specific numbers, but was still fairly informative) that illustrated the volume of Open-Xchange’s business that is delivered via the SaaS model versus on-premise model. While SaaS passed on-premise in 2008, it has really exploded in the last two years, with the SaaS volume doubling every year since 2008.
The company is at 42 million users as of today, continuing that pattern of doubling year-over-year.
Once again, he says this is all due to the success of the company’s partners, and the company’s success in winning exciting new partners (a list that includes the recent additions of China Mobile and Openwave, among others).
Here, he shifts to talking about where we’re going.
He says the SaaS market is growing at a rate of about 25 percent, expected by Forrester to reach $96 billion (and a huge chunk of the overall packaged software market) by 2016. The growth chart for SaaS looks a lot like the growth chart for Open-Xchange.
He also points to the mobile trend. He cites one prediction that says the smartphone penetration will go from 20 percent today to 80 percent in four years (although he doesn’t necessarily believe that).
Also important, is the fact that people with multiple devices (tablet and smartphone, say) are going to have to turn to cloud services (like SaaS email) to make those services work seamlessly between devices.
One way in which the mobile movement is driving consumerization is driving organizations to let their employees use their own devices for work. The payoff is that going to SaaS removes the burden of desktop management from these organizations.
Somewhat jokingly, he pulls up a few clunky words – cloudification, webification, consumerization and mobilization – to illustrate the fact that we’re all moving toward SaaS tools, empowering consumers to make purchasing decisions and going mobile.
He says mobile phones are Trojan horses, with services climbing out of them to cut off you and your services. Something like iCloud can cut away your customers just by meeting those needs within the flow of how they consume serices.
One day, says Laguna, all IT will be a hosted service, delivered virtually via mobile SaaS platforms.
People will buy those services from the service providers they trust, the local one with the best user experience and the best integrated service ecosystem.
And, he says, Open-Xchange will be the software provider for those service providers.
About Liam Eagle
Liam Eagle has worked as a contributor to the Web Host Industry Review since its inception in 2000, and as editor since 2003. He has been editor of the WHIR's print magazine since its launch. His daily involvement in the gathering and reporting of Web hosting news and his regular interaction with Web hosting leaders gives him an uncommonly broad appreciation of the issues and tends facing the business. Through his WHIR blog, Liam spots Web hosting trends and offers opinions on the industry-wide impacts of major developments and the motivation behind big announcements. Follow him on Twitter @liameagle
No related posts.
