Software 2008, a key part of the Interop Expo, was help April 29-30, at the Mandalay Bay Convention Center in Las Vegas.

I was on a panel on Tuesday, April 29, 3:45–4:45 pm entitled The New SaaS Model: Designing, Distributing and Monetizing Applications that was moderated by Shankar Iyer from WebEx. With me on the panel were Jason Lemkin, CEO of EchoSign and Dan Carmel, CEO of SpringCM. Both these companies are parts of the WebEx Connect ecosystem.

I took the long view while the other guys’ remarks were aimed at the more immediate future, as they grapple and scrap to close deals with marginal help from the platform / ecosystem.

My view was that the evolution of SaaS towards true utility computing has the real potential to rewrite the rules for small independent software vendors. Users’ expectations could shift much more quickly than software vendors’ product roadmaps, as the convenience of getting a bundle of services for a single monthly fee from a trusted vendor trumps the desire to find, buy and install best-of-breed applications for each specific functional need.

This sort of bundled service delivery is already happening on the home front. Consider Comcast. They bring me my VoIP telephone, my cable TV, my high speed internet and also a “free” antivirus (McAfee) for all my home computers. McAfee is “good enough” so I have basically stopped buying anti-virus programs for my home computers, even though I know that Kaspersky is a much better anti-virus program (I use it at work).

What does this imply for how ISVs should structure their businesses?  Then ask: what kind of returns can their investors hope to get? In my example above, instead of paying $75/year to Kaspersky, I am choosing to let Comcast decide what to pay McAfee. Hmmm!

I ran into Sanjay Subhedar, general partner at Storm Ventures, after the panel. (His company invested in EchoSign.) He remarked that my view of the future was a bleak one from his point of view, since it would severely limit his investment opportunities if it came to pass.

So perhaps it’s a good thing then that we turned down VC money and took an investment from Cisco instead.

I’ll be at Web 2.0 Expo San Francisco, April 22-24 2008 at Moscone West. WebEx has selected Act-On Software to showcase what ISV’s can achieve within the WebEx Connect platform.

I may be a bit biased but I think we have developed some of the most sophisticated Connect widgets. Our server side integrations with WebEx and Salesforce allow us to deliver some pretty powerful capabilities mashed up inside Connect’s Dojo based environment.

So I will be joining WebEx’s Shankar Iyer to talk about how Act-On works inside Connect. Come check out our session Thursday, April 24 from 11:00a to 11:50a in Room 2016:

Developing, Distributing, and Monetizing Web Applications with WebEx Connect

I am going to do a live demo. Let’s hope they have a good solid Internet connection!

This blog-centric Bay area event helped us, along with some 30 other barely-visible companies, gain a little attention. UtR’s Shay Nowick wrote: “However, there(?) solution seemed to be a little of everything.” She was paraphrasing the comment by WSJ’s Kara Swisher about the Ginsu knife coming to mind when she saw our product pitch.

Well, Kara, I will choose to take this as a compliment for 2 reasons:

1. According to Wikipedia, “the Ginsu became one of the most popular and widely-marketed products in history, even attracting a celebrity clientele”.
2. If an inarticulate engineer (me) nervously making the company’s first public presentation made you think of the Ginsu, then something special must have occurred since: (a) I did not at any time utter the following phrase: “But wait, there’s more!” and (b) at the end of my presentation, you did not hear me use my deep voice to give out the number to call, along with easy payment in 3 installments via credit card.

But, seriously, one of our key themes is the democratization of marketing — everyone participates, even the sales people. Customers often know their sales reps and are happy to hear from them, but the message needs to get built by marketing (for all the obvious reasons). So Act-On serves all these constituencies (”it’s email marketing, it’s webinar marketing, it’s web lead-gen capture, it’s sales support, …”). So this makes the Act-On service difficult to pigeon-hole, which is a good thing.

Thanks especially to these blogs for their support after meeting us:

• Mumboe “Act-On Software also gave a solid showing of their impressivemarketing automation software.”
• ServePath “For Act-On Software, enabling on-demand communication and collaboration with your sales and marketing teams is critical.”
• All Things Digital “The group I judged included: Act-On Software . . . All were interesting and promising, although all had issues, from security to marketing challenges to, of course, bigger competitors.”
• Webware “The Cisco-funded Act-On Software combines Salesforce.com’s leads database with WebEx’s large-scale conferencing . . .”

– Raghu