Now it is in the open. According to a recent article from Gigaom.com and research from Martin Wolf M&A Advisors, SaaS companies are getting much higher valuation when compared with legacy software vendors. The chart from Wolf M&A Advisors tells it all:

I knew we would get to this sooner or later as the move is definitely towards the cloud and ISVs that are resisting this move, will eventually run into issues if they do not re-architect their legacy solution as clients will require a true SaaS solution and not a solution that is “running in the cloud” but without really taking advantage of things such as scalability etc.

The Gigacom.com article concludes that it is not a surprise that enterprise vendors acquire smaller SaaS players such as the acquisition of RightNow Technologies by Oracle (1.5 billion). I work with ISVs around the world and I have seen many different types of organizations, some of them being start-ups and some making the transition from legacy business to SaaS business. One very popular way for traditional ISVs to make inroads to SaaS game is to build some type of an extension to the legacy solution to get experience what it is to build for the cloud and this also gives a more evolutionary way of creating something that can be sold to existing customers as add-on service.

I think each and every software executive should contemplate on the message from Gigaom and Martin Wolf especially if the company is in the game of getting sold in the future. The times of high license revenue with maintenance and support is gone and will be sooner or later replaced by monthly/quarterly recurring revenue where the software vendor has to create a solution that is not only used but loved by its users. Gone are the times where a software was sold that was both unfriendly to use but as the software vendor got its money, there was no incentive (other than getting the annual maintenance and support fee paid after first year) to ensure that the software was something that the buyer really liked. In the old-fashioned model, the company paid a large lump sum for the software and this was almost always a lock-in from the software vendor as the end user organization is always fully invested in the solution and is almost forced to pay the maintenance fee in the end. I do remember vividly when I was CEO for a business intelligence company when I was always worried whether our largest clients would pay the support/maintenance fee in the beginning of each year.