Thought Leader Interview
Bruce Cleveland has a knack for being in the right company at the right time. He was an original member of the Siebel executive team and prior to that had executive positions at Oracle and Apple. Not content to sit on his laurels, since 2006 Cleveland has been part of InterWest Partners. As a venture capitalist he is investing in software companies that share his vision of the future which includes SaaS and an emerging idea called revenue performance management of RPM which applies or embeds analytics into many aspects of front office automation. Embedding is the tricky part and it's not simply for show. Embedded analytics drive better decision making and lead to better operational outcomes. In this interview Cleveland discusses life after Siebel, RPM and his investments.
Denis Pombriant: Bruce, we’ve known each other since Siebel days when you were a senior vice president and I was a research VP at Aberdeen. What are some of the more significant changes in front office computing that you’ve seen in all that time?
Bruce Cleveland: Well, there are several, not the least of which is the rapid adoption of Software as a Service (SaaS) as the premier business model and form factor for front office computing. Clearly, we’ve seen an overhaul of the entire industry as it has converted to the SaaS business model over the past decade. And it’s pretty clear that this isn’t because SaaS is a better business model for vendors. In fact, the traditional software model where customers paid large amounts of cash up front and vendors weren’t necessarily responsible for the success of the application internally was a much better model for software vendors. SaaS, however, is a far better business model for the consumers of those applications. That’s because SaaS is far better suited to support the cadence of change in the business than traditional software delivery models. In the back office, changes happen much more slowly than the front office. For example, in the back office once I establish a purchase requisition policy, I can then publish that policy internally along with software and workflow that follows that policy and it stays relatively constant. In the front office, prices, deals, territories, competitors are changing all the time and at a comparatively rapid rate.
