Cloud enterprise company Host Analytics has just raised $25m in venture capital (read here). With the occasion, CEO Dave Kellogg, a enterprise software veteran, answered our questions about the business, the round and fiture plans.
FinSMEs: Hi Dave. Firstly, can you tell me something about you?
Dave: I’ve been with Host Analytics for about two and a half years. Before Host Analytics, I was the General Manager for Salesforce.com’s Service Cloud business. I’ve been in enterprise software for my whole career and spent nine years growing Business Objects from about $35M to more than $1B, and six years as CEO of MarkLogic, where we great from a $1M to $80M run-rate.
FinSMEs: Let’s speak about Host Analytics. What’s the opportunity you found in the market?
Dave: We’re playing in a big, well-established category. Gartner says that it’s over $3B, growing to $4B in the next few years. What we’re doing at Host Analytics is disrupting the EPM market by bringing the benefits of the cloud to EPM buyers. So our applications deploy faster and cost a lot less than their on-premises counterparts.
We also think there’s an opportunity to take EPM beyond the finance function, and unify the operational planning that’s happening in every department with the corporate plan that lives in finance. That lets companies be more agile in their planning processes and delivers better alignment between finance and operations.
FinSMEs: How does it work?
Dave: EPM basically describes a suite of applications that automate some key strategic financial processes. That includes planning, budgeting, and forecasting, as well as financial consolidations, reporting, and analytics. Together they help finance accelerate repetitive processes like planning or closing the books, drive broader accountability to the corporate plan across the organization, and deliver insights to help managers run the business more effectively. We deliver all of that in a real multi-tenant cloud model, so all of our customers are always on the latest version, and they get upgrades seamlessly and automatically.
FinSMEs: Where is the company in terms of growth?
Dave: We’re the fastest growing company in the space, having grown new Annual Recurring Revenue by more than 120% so far this year. We’re seeing an inflection point in the market. Finance has finally woken up to all of the advantages of the cloud, so we’re replacing a lot of the on-premises EPM software out there. Beyond that, the megavendors have recognized that buyers in the EPM market are going cloud, but they’ve only been able to put out half-baked, pseudo-cloud offerings, and they don’t have the real cloud business model behind it that customers really want.
FinSMEs: You just raised a round of funding. What can you tell me about it?
Dave: We raised a $25M round led by Centerview Capital Technology. We raised the money to support additional growth, investment in current and future products, and international expansion over the next couple of years. Our business is extremely healthy, we’re growing quickly, and we have a great “tailwind” because of the EPM market’s shift to the cloud. We think this funding puts us on a path to an amazing future and an incredible company.
FinSMEs: next plans?
Dave: We’ll continue to disrupt the traditional EPM space and replace legacy on-premises EPM applications. Beyond that, we’ll keep building out our portfolio of operational planning applications that help connect various operational functions to finance. We couldn’t be more excited for 2015.
FinSMEs
24/11/2014