Observations on the State of the Software Business

I had the opportunity to participate in this week’s Software Business 2009 conference in San Diego, CA.  My first role was as part of the keynote panel discussion, “Market Trends and Opportunities”, which featured the CEOs of two SaaS (software as a service) companies, WorkingPoint and Websense, as well as a widely-respected Venture Capitalist from Hummer Winblad Venture Partners.

We each gave brief presentations about our businesses and responded to questions from the audience. The questions that were posed to the panel were sophisticated, from an Information Technology perspective, and explored how each of our companies dealt with a range of critical challenges:

• How we leverage Cloud Computing while continuously advancing the security of your data
• Continuous development of our core – and premium – product feature sets
• Continue to add new business partners who offer complementary services – that combine to increase the power and value of your WorkingPoint solution.

You’ll note that the theme of the challenges in our industry is “Continuous Improvement”, and I’m delighted to report that we received extremely high marks – “Best of Class” achievements in every category discussed with participants at the conference.

I look forward to maintaining our leadership position as the premiere provider of complete online business management systems for small businesses.  Thank you for your continued support!