One on One with Jim Howard of CrownPeak

Jim Howard is CEO at CrownPeak Technologies, a web content management company, which delivers its product as software as a service (SaaS). Howard has been running his company since it launched back in 2001, a tough year to start a company based on a business model that was still fairly unknown back then. But the growth and acceptance of SaaS, not coincidentally, has mirrored CrownPeak's growth. In the past seven years, CrownPeak has experienced explosive growth, with over 90 percent year-over-year revenue increases.

Among the companies in the CrownPeak client roster are Staples, 3M, Home Depot and other well known companies. CrownPeak has been named to the EContent 100 by EContent Magazine, one of the top 25 ASPs in the world by ASPNews and was chosen as an SIIA Codie Award finalist for Best Content Management Solution three years in a row. Howard was named by CMS Watch as one of the 20 People to Watch in Content Management

I asked Howard about his company, web content management and his SaaS.

FCM: I've been writing quite a bit lately about cloud computing. Your product is offered as a service. What are the pros and cons of this approach?

Howard: I struggle to find the cons of this approach. Really, the question in IT organizations has become: How can we justify implementing and managing this project internally?

The biggest issue with true cloud computing right now is that providers aren't fully matured. SaaS companies like CrownPeak have been running in reliable environments for many years. However, Amazon is just offering their first Microsoft-based cloud computing environment coming up in the next few months, and has had some much-discussed ups and downs. Some maturity in the major providers will help.

The pros of both cloud computing and SaaS have been well documented. Improved services, reliability, performance, and cost are the primary benefits. I would add joint "visibility" as another, where customers are able to see how the application and environment are functioning, and we can see how and where our customers find value in the application. This transparency and the inherent accountability of SaaS providers create an improved trust relationship between vendor and customer--and results in a continually improving product. It's something that installed software vendors just simply cannot do.

FCM: How does SaaS give you an advantage in a bad economy?

Howard: There are three major advantages for customers with SaaS in a tough economy:

• Low upfront or no upfront fee
• Turn the contract off on short notice
• High levels of service, regardless of the state of IT budgets

FCM: Why should customers trust their website data outside the firewall?

Howard: The website itself is outside the firewall. The tool people use to update the website could live inside the firewall, but is that really helping anybody in any way? Almost certainly not. CrownPeak puts a huge amount of effort into security. Our customers have a backup of the website, and a backup of the staged version of the website, and a backup of the CMS itself. Therefore, we tend to improve data security.

FCM: I wrote last week about a CMS Watch study that suggested smaller vendors like yours could offer a lower buying risk. Why do you think that is?

Howard: CrownPeak is a good example of a stable company, even in a very tough economy. We have low or no upfront costs, and we are economical over time. We also are specialists--all we do is web content management, so we have become very good at helping our customers succeed. And we have contracts that customers have to renew for us to make our business work. CrownPeak concentrates on service and customer satisfaction as core to our ability to succeed. So, we reduce risk from poor implementations, shelf-ware projects, poor service experience and shoddy application or security management. Either we do a good job or our customers go away.

FCM: How do you think the economy is going to affect your organization next year and how are you preparing for it?

Howard: A bad economy is bad for every business. I can't predict how deep or how long economic factors will be unfavorable. However, we are well suited for these circumstances. We are a great lower-cost, lower-risk way to get web content management done. We are a strong, predictable business. So our preparation is simply to not add new costs unless we have added new recurring revenue. That way, we stay comfortably away from cash erosion, and keep our levels of services and product development high, even when other companies are likely to struggle and be forced to cut back. Remember, we will grow next year if we only add one new client, and we'll use the added income from that growth to fund improved services and products for our customers. That's the beauty of SaaS.

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