I clearly remember my first experience with Saas (Software as a Service) applications. I remember seeing that last server in our office shut down and the absence of the humming coming from that corner room. We adopted cloud-based SaaS applications for product development, bug tracking, agile project management, document management and customer service. The accessibility, lack of maintenance and reliability these applications offered was awesome!
However, the move to SaaS applications didn’t come without headaches. The first challenge is discover of applications that are suitable to your business. As we were a tech startup we had a pretty good knowledge of what was out there, but I can’t imagine a business owner outside of the tech space being able to find suitable SaaS applications for their business! Another challenge (and major headache) was the administration, provisioning and management of all the applications. Anytime there was a change in the payment plan, someone needed access to an application, permissions levels needed to be changed or an employee left the company it was extremely frustrating and time consuming to log into every single application’s website to make the necessary changes.
Enter our latest investment – AppDirect. The first time I met Nicolas and Daniel I immediately recognized the pain they were solving. The AppDirect platform allows a person to administer, provision, manage payment plans and subscribe to SaaS application all from a single portal. In addition to this, they have built a recommendation engine that allows application discovery for your business needs. AppDirect takes away the intimidation of using cloud business applications and makes it as simple as using a mobile app store on your phone.
AppDirect also offers a huge value to SaaS application developers. Getting distribution for an application is hard. AppDirect offers developers instant access to thousands of businesses and a user-friendly API that can offload much of the support and management functionality necessary in a SaaS application. Most applications are up on the AppDirect platform in less than a week.
Lastly, AppDirect’s white-label PaaS (Platform as a Service) is a huge win for large companies with existing access to businesses. Their first partner, Bell Canada, is already up and offering SaaS applications to their many customers. I am sure that we are going to hear of many more partner announcements in the near future.
Not very often do we see companies that address the entire value chain; from the developers, to the distributors and, most importantly, to the end users. This is why we are excited to be backing Nicolas and Daniel and the great team they have assembled. Nicolas and Dan have shown over the past couple of years that they can execute and have incredible passion for their business. Even better, they are both Canadians. That has to count for something,right?
Check out the full press release here.
*Update – AppDirect took home Audience Choice for Best in Show Overall and Best SMB Tool at today’s Under the Radar conference in Mountainview, CA. Congrats guys! Check out the release here.
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