Force.com Platform Offers Path to Profit in Ten Months
How does a small startup attract topnotch customers like Hitachi, Symantec, and CBS and within one year turn a profit? The way Apttus puts it, quite easily.
In only two months, the company built its first application entirely on the Force.com platform—a comprehensive infrastructure that provides backend and front-end capabilities required to design market-ready enterprise applications—and delivered it via the AppExchange. Apttus was drawn to salesforce.com’s ISV (independent software vendor) value proposition: zero startup costs using the Force.com platform; rapid time to market; and the instant credibility of aligning with a company on the leading edge of the on-demand revolution. In one year, Apttus acquired 26 customers and 6,500 users. “I honestly believe that we could not have achieved the level of success we have if it were not for the Force.com platform,” says Kirk Krappe, CEO of Apttus. “We are profitable because we didn’t need tens of millions of dollars in investment and could draw on the credibility and tested performance of Salesforce to win customers.”
Apttus sells contract and proposal management applications and derives its name from the Latin word “ap-tus” meaning capable and fast. To live up to its name, the company depends on the Force.com platform to ensure its Contract Management Suite of applications can be deployed quickly and with a high level of performance.
A Forceful Partnership
Force.com is the world’s first Platform as a Service (PaaS) that enables Apttus to design and deliver its applications on demand, without the need to invest in software or backend infrastructure. As a Force.com partner, Apttus markets to Salesforce and non-Salesforce customers. The result is a unique strategic alliance that drives mutual benefits for both parties: salesforce.com drives platform adoption via an indirect channel while Apttus enjoys a multitude of Force.com capabilities and cost-saving rewards that give the company considerable competitive advantage.
“We provide capabilities most of our competitors cannot,” Krappe says. “The functionality we
were able to add to our product right out of gate is just incredible. Dashboards, reporting,
integration with Outlook and backend systems—all of these are Salesforce features we inherit as a
deliverable of our core product, which we were able to quickly market and capitalize on.”
Apttus has six U.S. employees, one in the UK, and 13 engineering contractors in
India. The business model is executed as the purest example of native applications running solely
on the Force.com platform—a major reason Apttus won an Appy Award for the “Best Native Application”
at salesforce.com’s Dreamforce 2007 user and developer conference. The company generates leads
through joint marketing webinars with salesfore.com, Google search engine marketing, and the
AppExchange marketplace.
“Because we’re running natively on the platform, whatever new features salesforce.com adds in
new releases gets automatically incorporated into our offerings,” Krappe adds. “Other AppExchange
apps are built on their own platforms and integrated through the UI. We’re running directly on the
Force.com platform and get to take advantage of those upgrades instantly.”
Go-To-Market Advantages
Apttus attributes the credibility salesfore.com lends and points to such benefits as SAS 70 and
a systems status trust site— elements a startup could not possibly provide on its own—in landing
such large-scale deals as a multi thousand-seat contract with Symantec.
“The traditional startup model is dead when it comes to applications with business function
capabilities,” Krappe continues. “The day is gone when you can do what we’ve done—which is sell an
enterprise app in less than one year—w ithout the industry-proven, out-of-the box infrastructure
and delivery model Force.com provides.”
The business advantages of being associated with salesforce.com is apparent as it relates to
the security levels required by Fortune 500 companies and the like, which Apttus could not ensure
if it did not run its business on the Force.com platform.
“We go into sales meetings equipped with salesforce.com’s rock-solid security and
reliability, evidenced by serving more than 38,000 customers,” Krappe explains. “There is no way we
could even come to the table without the built-in advantages of things like proven data protection,
fail-over, and mirroring. Plus, our demos are extremely rich. It gives us a natural leg up on the
competition.”
Force.com Beats out Java and .NET
Before Apttus decided to go with the Force.com platform to build its products, executives
considered .NET. What the executive team soon came to realize was that it would take ten times the
amount of time and effort to build the fundamental infrastructure for its application with .NET
than it would take with Force.com. Plus, with Force.com they gained core capabilities of Salesforce
right out of the box with proven response times and performance.
“We come from the .NET world and our conclusion was that it would just take too much time to
build the fundamental building blocks of the core capability when you compare what you get with
Force.com,” Krappe says. “We didn’t have to build a thing. Sure there are some minor limitations,
but the 90-10 rule prevails here and it is well worth the trade-offs.”
The cost savings were also a main driver in the decision to go with Force.com. Krappe
estimates that from a R&D resource standpoint, it would cost $4 to $5 million to build the
application and provide the same capabilities. The infrastructure and physical delivery would incur
another $3 to $5 million dollars. “It’s spectacular what we’ve been able to achieve with so little
upfront investment,” states Krappe. “In 2000, I raised $55 million to start a company and failed to
get to profitability. It’s amazing where we are right now. We’re on a major momentum roll.”
Given the innovation that the Force.com inspires, Apttus plans to continue to create additional applications and build on the astounding success it has enjoyed to date. In a business environment where the heavy lifting is left to someone else—in this case a reputable company with solid market share—Apttus can focus exclusively on building new innovative solutions that will round out its offerings and help the company grow long into the future.
How do I get started?
The best way to get started is to follow the Force.com Quick Start steps.
