Startable – Healy Jones’ & Prasad Thammineni’s Blog

The SaaS business model is becoming an increasingly important part of the New England technology landscape. It makes a lot of sense that New England technology companies would lean towards the Software as a Service model, since this area has historically been a strong enterprise software innovation center and SaaS is the new way to sell enterprise software. I’m starting a list of some of the SaaS companies HQ’d in New England, with a particular emphasis on ones serving the small and medium businesses market.

I’m sure I’ve left off quite a few – please email me or post comments below so I can try to get a better running list!!

acquia - Acquia is a commercial open source software company providing products, services, and technical support for the open source Drupal social publishing system. They should soon be releasing “Drupal Gardens,” a software-as-a-service version of Drupal that speeds the design and deployment of Drupal social publishing sites for new, non-technical users including small business owners and web designers. The company is funded by Northbridge and Sigma.

Cloudswitch – Some amazing technologists and executives have come together to help enterprises fully capture the power of cloud computing. (Disclaimer, my former employer Atlas Venture is an investor.) The exact business model hasn’t yet been publicly announced but it has the potential to be big…

Constant Contact – THE email marketing company, CTCT is one of the New England’s better known public software companies. CTCT increased revenues in Q1 2009 to $28.1 million, up 55% from Q1 the year before. Gail Goodman, the CEO, has been a local leader in promoting software innovation by offering her experiences and advice to a number of the up-and-coming younger companies.

Carbonite – Seriel entrepreneur David Friend’s online backup company launched in 2006 and has now backed up over 2.5 billion files. The company is a marketing machine. Carbonite is based in Boston and was originally backed by local angel group CommonAngels.

Gomez – A Lexington based company focused on providing SaaS solutions that help companies develop, manage and test their web sites before and after deployment. Customers include Best Buy, Starwood and Wacovia.

Grasshopper – The company formerly known as GotVMail has served over 70,000 SMB customers, providing voice and voicemail services – all without having raised venture capital. People in Boston need to talk about this company more.

Hubspot – At the forefront of online inbound marketing, Hubspot continues to grow despite the tough economy. Matrix and General Catalyst are the venture investors backing this Cambridge based marketing leader. They are winning the SMB marketing software space because they understand how to market to SMBs.

Kadient - Kadient provides an on-demand sales enablement platform. The company is located in Lowel.

Logmein - Still on file to go public, Logmein has quite a big revenue and customer base. Late in May they updated their IPO registration statement, and clocked in a healthy $51.7 million in revenue, up from $27 million in 2007 – why is no one talking about this awesome company? Oh, and they offer remote connectivity solutions to SMBs – SOMETHING LIKE 200,000 PAYING PREMIUM ACCOUNTS! Why aren’t more people talking about this company?

Makana Solutions - Makana means reward in Hawaiian, and Makana Solutions builds a SaaS solution that helps people who build incentive compensation plans design effective compensation plans.

Nasuni – I’ve heard this is a stealth New England SaaS company… anyone have any info?

Pixily – This Waltham based company offers paper document management to SMBs in a SaaS model. Pixily is one of the local standard bearers for using Amazon’s web services. Obviously this one is near and dear to my heart…

Wordstream – Wordstream is a self optimizing keyword management tool pay per click online advertising campaigns. It is backed by Sigma Partners and based in Boston.

I hope that this can be a crowd-sourced list – please put a comment below to remind me/tell me about other SaaS companies in New England that should be included!

*Note that I don’t have any insider information on any of the public companies I mention here; I’m getting all my info off of their websites/SEC filings. Let me know if I’ve messed any info up due to a typo.

Thanks to Mike Volpe for a few of these including Kadient…