SaaS Featured Article

Verticals onDemand, a vendor of Software-as-a-Service CRM products for the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industry, has secured $4 million of funding from Emergence Capital Partners, a venture capital firm specializing in investing in technology-enabled services companies.

 

Some of Emergence's other investments include Salesforce.com (News - Alert), SuccessFactors and HireRight.

 

"Verticals onDemand is capitalizing on two of the next big trends in SaaS (News - Alert) — vertical markets and platform-as-a-service," said Gordon Ritter, general partner of Emergence Capital, citing the company's "focus and domain expertise in the pharmaceutical and biotech CRM market, Force.com platform and development experience."

 

This latest funding for Verticals onDemand will be used to accelerate the growth of the company's flagship VBioPharma SaaS CRM application in the life sciences market, Emergence officials say, and to expand the product footprint into other vertical markets.

 

Verticals onDemand officials say interest in VBioPharma from large, global pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies and emerging market leaders has grown this year as companies "realize the value of a vertical CRM product built on a flexible, scalable platform." The vendor signed over 15 new customers in the last ten months.

 

"In the not so distant past, life sciences companies were in the unfortunate position to have to choose between the lesser of two evils -- a generalist SaaS CRM product or an inflexible but vertical client/server application," said Peter Gassner, president and chief executive officer of Verticals onDemand.

 

Earlier this month Verticals onDemand launched a new category of on-demand applications — Mobility-as-a-Service, described by company officials as providing offline access to the VBioPharma CRM system.

 

Life sciences companies "can deploy mobile applications that do not require additional maintenance costs or effort to support and enhance," company officials say.

 

The new VMobile application runs on any Microsoft (News - Alert) Windows XP or Vista-based laptop or Tablet PC. Like other multitenant SaaS applications, all VMobile users run the same version of the underlying software code, enabling back-office upgrades. VMobile also automatically reads the VBioPharma metadata, allowing customers to configure the application only once for deployment both online and offline.

 

Similar to user synchronization sessions with traditional mobile applications, VMobile sends new data to the server and downloads relevant data updates for the user. "But, unlike other mobile products," company officials say, "any new versions of the application, software updates, and metadata are also included in this same synchronization session without any IT staff involvement."

 

The new MaaS application is an extension of VBioPharma, Verticals onDemand's SaaS CRM application launched in 2007.