Emerging opportunity for investors and entrepreneurs, offered by the platform-as-a-service trend.

Keywords: PaaS, Force.com, Emergence, VC
Authors: Matt Holleran, Emergence Capital.
Matt joined Emergence from salesforce.com where he was the Vice President of Appexchange Partners. His team led the Appexchange partner ecosystem at salesforce.com from inception. Matt has 12 years of experience in business applications serving SMB to Fortune 50 customers with functional expertise in marketing, product management, sales, channels and business development.

Prior to salesforce.com, Matt was the CEO of Apexon (acquired by STG), VP Marketing and Business Development of Datasweep (acquired by Rockwell Automation (ROK)), and served in several product, marketing and direct sales roles at Clarify (CLFY). He personally discovered the impact of information technology on productivity when he held line manufacturing positions at Cummins Engine Company (CMI). He started his career as a Financial Analyst in Morgan Stanley's private equity division. Matt graduated cum laude with a B.A. in Engineering Sciences and Economics from Dartmouth College and has an M.B.A from Harvard.
Abstract:
The cloud has emerged as a disruptive force, something venture capitalists live for. SaaS pioneers, like Salesforce.com and NetSuite, broke through to customers with their innovative and flexible solutions that offered rapid ROI. Today, the platform-as-a-service trend adds fuel to the fire, as new companies are able to get to market quickly, leveraging one of the many powerful platforms, including Amazon EC2, Google App Engine and Salesforce.com's Force.com. These platforms eliminate the need to build out an expensive data center and, what's more, each offers a built-in audience of potential customers around the world. Emergence was the first to fund a company built purely on one of these platforms, and invested $2 million in Maxplore to accelerate their growth.

This presentation will review the emerging opportunity for investors and entrepreneurs, offered by the platform-as-a-service trend.