Tom Paine
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Seven years ago, a little startup called Verticals onDemand got its start, headquartered in California and having an east coast office focused on sales and customer service located along the Main Line. Concentrating on the life sciences industry and using Saleforce.com's software as a service (SaaS) platform, Verticals onDemand eventually became Veeva Systems,
which did an IPO last year and now has a market value of nearly $4 billion.
Then, in April of this year
Salesforce.com laid out a strategy to enter specific verticals through partnerships, investments or acquisitions, using Veeva's success as a model to emulate.
One example of that strategy is based right here in Villanova. RoundCorner describes its mission as "changing the way people change the world" and aims to provide "lifetime constituent management for non-profits." In the past two weeks RoundCorner was featured in two major announcements by Salesforce.com and the Salesforce.com Foundation addressing two verticals:
one for serving the non-profit market with an offering called NGO Connect, and
the other for higher education recruitment, marketing and building lifetime relationships, under the label Salesforce1 for High Ed. That includes a app created by RoundCorner, Advancement Connect. NGO Connect's initial clients include the Girl Scouts of the USA and the Sierra Club. Salesforce1 for Higher Ed has started with the University of Southern California, Arizona State University, College for America at Southern New Hampshire University and Cornell University (also a Workday client).
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| Dan Lammot/LinkedIn |
RoundCorner's President and one of its founding partners is Daniel Lammot, a Southern California native and Villanova graduate with a degree in psychology. Dan co-founded OKERE Inc., a New York-based implementer of Salesforce.com CRM installations that was acquired by Fujitsu in 2007. Lammot stayed on at Fujitsu for a while after the acquisition until leaving to start RoundCorner in 2009.
RoundCorner now has about 60 employees primarily in three offices; Villanova (headquarters), San Francisco and New York. In the non-profit market earlier this year
RoundCorner acquired FoundationConnect, a cloud grants management application for non-profits, from NPower.
In the higher ed recruitment space, Lammot told me in a phone interview that RoundCorner was partnering with
TargetX of Conshohocken, which also uses the Saleforce1 platform.
I asked if it was a coincidence that the Salesforce/RoundCorner higher ed announcement
occurred on the same day as
Workday's announcement of a very similarly targeted product, and Lammot assured me it was merely that. Both Workday and Salesforce execs have experience with Oracle Peoplesoft (Workday's execs founded it), which was a leader in higher ed systems but has not transitioned well into the cloud and is seen as very vulnerable. Veeva has had much of its success taking share from another Oracle acquistion, Siebel Systems, which is also a legacy competitor in the non-profit CRM market. Larry Ellison is addressing Cloud and SaaS issues at this week's Oracle OpenWorld, but its not clear to what extent its aging product lines will be upgraded.
Workday's announcement Thursday was of one module of what is expected to be a full suite of higher ed offerings. I ask Lammot whether either RoundCorner or Salesforce could expand further into higher ed beyond the initial module, and he said that was certainly a possibility.
Salesforce made an investment in RoundCorner last year, the size of which is not known. The investment was the first time Salesforce.com (the corp entity) made an investment in a company (roundCorner) focused on the mission of the Salesforce Foundation. The Salesforce.com Foundation is actively involved in the RoundCorner partnership, offering incentives and discounts to new clients.
Lammot says he is happy to be back in the Villanova area with his family. He serves on the advisory board of the Villanova School of Business' Center for Innovation, Creativity and Entrepreneurship, and is involved in other civic and charitable causes.
