Crisis as a Service

I had written up a draft about the success of SaaS despite (or because) of the financial crisis. I was suppose to publish it on CloudAve, but Ben Kepes beat me to it with his post ‘SaaS Model Proven? Time to Focus on Revenue?’.

Zoli predicted it and Krishnan agreed with him when the financial crisis dugg deeper: SaaS and cloud computing benefits in a recession.

So far we have seen the amazing 33% growth in number of customers in 50 days by Xero and many SaaS vendors have reported record Q4 sales such as:

• NetSuite Q4 revenues in Q4 were up 30,5% from Q4 previous year.
• 24SevenOffice revenues in Q4 were up 135% from Q4 previous year. (Disclaimer: I co-founded 24SevenOffice)
• SalesForce.com revenues in 2008 were up 35% from previous year.
• Joyent 56% increase in revenues in six months.
• Mimecast up 318% compared to previous year

FreshBooks are reporting their best sales ever this January and Zimbra celebrated crossing the 40 million mark for paid mailboxes. For some this is just too much growth to believe but it is the result of the beneifts that SaaS offers boosted by cost-cutting companies. Previously companies choose SaaS for a number of benefits and the financial downturn made them all nearly irrelevant except one: cost. SaaS is cheaper to implement, host, support and upgrade.

So if you are a SaaS-vendor; here’s to a financial crisis!