at setting up email servers and voice systems, they are far too valuable to your organization to waste their time on such rote tasks. Your cost of capital is also likely very high, making upfront hardware and license costs unnec- essarily expensive for a young company. By pushing as much as possible into the cloud, you avoid management headaches and make these expenses variable. We highlight many of the best-of-breed offerings by category in Bessemer’s Cloudscape, and there are dozens more emerging monthly. Cloud businesses should also leverage PaaS and IaaS whenever possible for core product development. There has been a massive change in the consumer internet world over the last few years, with the vast majority of Michael Tessler new internet websites and applications now using cloud environments such CEO, Broadsoft (NASDAQ:BSFT) as Amazon Web Services as the foundation of their development from the first day. We believe that quality of service and portability issues are rapidly “We enable telephony services delivered resolving themselves at a level that will be suitable for enterprise deploy- from ‘the cloud,’ and every employee ments, and a similar migration will occur within the software and Software- is a power user of our communication as-a-Service worlds over the coming years. There has also been an explo- services.This way everyone in our com- pany is an expert on the product and can sion of cloud based PaaS services that are part of the “developer citizenry” easily understand a user’s needs, from the revolution, giving application developers access to a long list of powerful veteran sales executive APIs that can be quickly integrated into product offerings, and purchased to a new customer on a consumption basis with little or no upfront commitment. account manager.” #2 Build for the Doer, Build Employee Software Employees are now powerful customers themselves, and not just through their managers. We’re witnessing the “Con- sumerization of Software,” so focus on ease of use for SaaS, and “developer citizenry” for PaaS and IaaS. The gig is up. Pandora’s box is open. Your customers all now know that software doesn’t have to suck anymore. They use rich internet applications including Facebook and Skype to communicate with their friends; they use LinkedIn to manage their business networks, Google or Wikipedia to find accurate online content, Yelp to find restaurants, and Travelocity to book flights. Your potential customers are now looking for similar “cheap and cheerful” products in an open revolt against the years of oppression by the likes of SAP and Oracle. You should therefore beg, borrow, and follow: take inspiration from the best online products you can find and leverage the fact that you’re naturally smaller and more nimble than the incumbents to provide the best user experience imaginable. Whether it’s a “Freemium” model, a hybrid sales model with a heavy inside corporate sales element, or even an enter- Bessemer Venture Partners 5