CS309A: Software as a Service

Stanford University

CS309A
Software as a Service

Our lecturers this quarter include:

Timothy Chou launched this class in 2005 after having spent five years as the President of Oracle On Demand. While he did teach "real stuff" (CS110/EE181) for fifteen years at Stanford this class is dedicated to exposing business and technical students to the wide range of business models and leaders in the software industry. Over the past three years over 25 CEOs and founders of important companies in the industry have delivered lectures. He recently authored a book, Seven: Software Business Models based on his own experiences as well as many of the campfire stories from these accomplished people.

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CS309A Schedule:

  September 23, 2008

We welcome back Jonathan. For the third year in a row he has opened up our class and given the first lecture. Sun, born at Stanford, has been one of Silicon Valley's most important companies. With over $10B in revenue and the recent acquisition of MySQL it will be interesting to see how Jonathan sees the future of software. He was one of the first public company CEOs to blog. Read his blog at http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/.


  September 30, 2008

As most people know we not only talk about software for business, but we also talk about software for consumers. I heard the story of Zappos on Nightline and had to invite Tony to come and talk about the unique challenges they face.


  October 7, 2008

Bill Clinton authored a book, Giving, Bill Gates created the world's largest foundation with assets nearing $40B and charitable giving hit a record $306 billion in the U.S. last year. Marc Chardon heads the largest software company dedicated to producing software for nonProfits and with the acquisition of Kintera and eTapestry now offers software in both Models Four and Six. (Disclosure: I am on the Board of Directors of Blackbaud)


  October 14, 2008

All of us know the story of Google's consumer business, but few are aware of how much Google has been doing in the enterprise. With the acquisition of Postini for spam filtering, the introduction of Google Apps and the deployment of over 10,000 Google search appliances Google's enterprise business would be the envy of many startups.


  October 21, 2008

Netsuite was founed in 1998 by Evan Goldberg and Larry Ellison. Zach joined as the CEO in 2002 and in late 2007 Netsuite made one of the most successful initial public offerings of the year. Netsuite took on the challenge of offering an entire ERP/CRM business suite as a service and today have a nearly $1B market cap.


  October 28, 2008

Search as changed our experiences as consumer - whether it's buying a book, finding a date or planning a vacation. Search in the enterprise can be as game-changing, which is perhaps why Microsoft bought John's company, FAST, for $1.2B in April 2008


  November 4, 2008

Oracle continues to be the largest business software company in the world. Much of the M&A strategy that Oracle has implemented over the past four years originated with and has been guided by Charles.


  November 11, 2008

Perhaps many next generation vertical SaaS applications will orginate inside existing corporations. American Airlines gave birth to the SABRE airline reservation system, which as a public company was valued at over $1B. Javier engineered a similar carve out of an advanced hotel reservation system designed to handle the largest hotel chain in Latin America.


  November 18, 2008

Josh James and John Pestana met as undergraduates at a computer science class at Brigham Young University. They focused their first business on Web design, developer’s tools, and gathering Web visitor data primarily for small businesses. But, over time, the partners shifted to a strategy of providing Web analytics solutions for large enterprise customers. Reflecting the new business focus, the company was renamed Omniture in 1998. Omniture is derived from the words "omniscient" and "future." The rest as they say is history.