SI
SI
discoversearch

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor.  We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community.  If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.
Technology Stocks : Cloud, edge and decentralized computing -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?


To: stockman_scott who wrote (531)1/1/2011 11:14:27 AM
From: Glenn Petersen  Read Replies (10) | Respond to of 1685
 
Another on-demand company, the venture capital backed Responsys, Inc., has filed an S-1. The company provides software that enables marketers to design, execute and manage email campaigns.



Responsys website

Responsys SEC filings

From the company’s S-1, filed December 23, 2010:

Responsys is a leading provider of on-demand software that enables companies to engage in relationship marketing across the interactive channels that consumers are embracing today—email, mobile, social and the web. The Responsys Interact Suite, the core element of our solution, provides marketers with a broad and powerful set of integrated applications to create, execute, optimize and automate marketing campaigns across the key interactive channels. Our solution is comprised of our on-demand software and professional services, all focused on enabling the marketing success of our customers. We sell primarily through a direct sales force and target enterprise and larger mid-market companies that seek to implement more advanced marketing programs across interactive channels. For the years ended December 31, 2007, 2008 and 2009, our total revenue was $37.6 million, $50.1 million and $66.6 million, respectively, representing year-over-year growth of 33% in 2008 and 2009. For the nine months ended September 30, 2010, our total revenue was $63.4 million, representing 36% growth over the same period in the prior year. As of September 30, 2010, we had 266 customers of varied size across a wide variety of industries, including retail and consumer, travel, financial services and technology.

Marketing is undergoing a significant shift as rapid adoption of digital technology has dramatically changed consumer behavior. Interactive marketing channels, including email, mobile, social and the web, are rapidly supplanting traditional media channels as consumers’ primary source of entertainment and information. This has created both an opportunity and an imperative for companies to market to their customers by engaging them across all of these interactive channels. According to Forrester Research, Inc., or Forrester, U.S. spending on interactive marketing is expected to increase to nearly $55 billion and represent 21% of all marketing spending by 2014, as marketers shift dollars away from traditional media toward interactive channels. U.S. interactive marketing spend on email, mobile and social media, the primary interactive channels currently used for relationship marketing, is expected to grow from $2.4 billion in 2009 to nearly $6.5 billion by 2014, representing a compound annual growth rate of 22%.

Interactive channels enable marketers to substantially improve the effectiveness of their relationship marketing efforts by executing more relevant and timely campaigns to their customers and known prospects. However, this shift to interactive marketing has also caused the execution of marketing campaigns to become increasingly complex, real-time and dependent on technology. We believe that for marketers to capture the opportunity provided by interactive channels, they need a solution built for relationship marketing across those interactive channels. Our Interact Suite is a software-as-a-service, or SaaS, platform that empowers relationship marketers to effectively execute permission-based campaigns across the key interactive channels. It is comprised of multiple tightly integrated applications, built on an open and flexible platform, which enables our customers to integrate and leverage data from multiple sources to ensure relevant and timely marketing.

Underwriters: Morgan Stanley, William Blair and Company, JMP Securities, Credit Suisse and Pacific Crest Securities

Estimated (preliminary) gross proceeds: $60,000,000

Revenues
Nine months ending September 30, 2010: $63,399,000
Year ending December 31, 2009: $66,643,000
Year ending December 31, 2008: $50,114,000
Year ending December 31, 2007: $37,604,000

Operating profits (loss)
Nine months ending September 30, 2010: $5,845,000
Year ending December 31, 2009: $9,764,000
Year ending December 31, 2008: $3,401,000
Year ending December 31, 2007: $5,237,000

Net profit (loss)
Nine months ending September 30, 2010: $3,105,000
Year ending December 31, 2009: $5,886,000
Year ending December 31, 2008: $20,447,000
Year ending December 31, 2007: $5,426,000



To: stockman_scott who wrote (531)1/4/2011 9:29:07 PM
From: Glenn Petersen2 Recommendations  Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 1685
 
How the Cloud is Driving Profits at Rackspace

By Rich Miller
Data Center Knowledge
January 4th, 2011



A chart of revenue per square foot for Rackspace data centers.
__________

Cloud computing has many benefits for end users. But can it make data center providers more profitable? Financial metrics show that the growing cloud computing operation at Rackspace Hosting is helping the company deliver more revenue from its data centers.

Over the past year, Rackspace (RAX) has added 38,000 customers, nearly all of them in its fast-growing cloud hosting business. During that time, Rackspace has seen the average revenue for each square foot of finished data center space increase from $3,764 to $4,602 – an improvement of 22 percent. That explains how Rackspace was able to boost its quarterly revenue by 23 percent (from $459 million to $565 million) without spending tons of cash to expand its data center facilities.

Different Economics for Cloud Computing

The data validates Rackspace’s belief that cloud computing can be more profitable than the company’s managed hosting business. The two approaches to hosting have very different economics – managed hosting is a premium service used primarily by enterprise customers, while cloud computing is an affordably-priced service with major traction in the small business market.

So how can cloud computing be more profitable? It all comes down to utilization – how efficiently the provider can use its server hardware and data center space.

This is where the Rackspace data is useful. The San Antonio hosting provider has been the best source for data on cloud economics for providers, due to its thorough disclosure of financial and operational metrics in its quarterly earnings reports.

Metrics for Cloud Financial Performance

This has allowed us to analyze the company’s performance on average revenue per user (ARPU) and revenue per server as the company has made the transition from a managed hosting specialist to a cloud provider. The thousands of new cloud computing customers each pay a tiny fraction of the revenue Rackspace receives from a single customer in its managed hosting business. In terms of ARPU, a common metric for hosting performance, the managed hosting business looks much more attractive.

But Rackspace says it can get extra mileage from its infrastructure from improved utilization – the ability to pack more customers onto each server in a cloud platform – as well as an extended lifespan as retired servers from the managed hosting business are incorporated into cloud computing clusters with higher fault tolerance.

That has been borne out by an upward trend in revenue per server, which Rackspace sees as a key metric for its business progress.
The revenue-per-square-foot data provides an even broader view of the operational benefits of cloud computing:

More servers per rack: A standardized cloud computing operation allows service providers to pack more servers into each rack, since the data center operator has extensive experience and data on how to cool these racks. In the one-year period ending Sept. 30, Rackspace added 9,327 square feet of finished data center space, an increase of 5.5 percent. Its utilization rate – the amount of floor space taken up by server racks – improved by 6.6 percent to 69.9 percent. But Rackspace’s server count jumped by 17 percent to 62,996. That means the newer racks for the cloud computing operation are fuller than the older ones.

More customers per server: Rackspace’s customer base grew from 80,944 to 118,732. That’s an increase of 46 percent, far outpacing the 17 percent growth in server count – meaning more customers on each server. How many on each server? We can’t say precisely, since the numbers include some churn in both the cloud and managed hosting operations. But the trends are clear.

None of these trends will be a surprise to folks operating large platforms for single applications. Companies like Microsoft, Google and Facebook have custom-engineered their data centers around the requirements of their apps. But the Rackspace data offers insight into the potential cloud benefits for hosting companies, who currently must support customers with a wide variety of requirements. Many of these hosting providers are charting a path to the cloud.

The financial performance also explains why Rackspace and its cloud hosting brethren Terremark (TMRK) and Savvis (SVVS) were among 2010's top performers among publicly-held data center providers.

datacenterknowledge.com