Web services aggregator Jamcracker Inc. announced it has signed over 100 customers to its Jamcracker Enterprise platform.
“We’re adding customers faster than we’d anticipated, and our infrastructure has scaled accordingly to accommodate our growth,” said Todd Johnson, vice president of worldwide marketing for Jamcracker. “Since January, we’ve been consciously moving up-market, with a few over 1,000 seats, and many more in the 500- to 700-seat range.”
This hunt for bigger game has resulted in two notable deployments: InfoSpace, with more than 1,000 seats, and Blue Martini, with 515 seats globally, spanning four continents. Jamcracker is providing Jamcracker Enterprise and Human Resources services to all U.S.-based InfoSpace employees. For Blue Martini, an e-CRM application provider, Jamcracker is providing MS Desktop Support and Dispatch Service as well as iPass remote access service.
“The economy is really helping us move up-market,” Johnson told InternetNews. “The bigger companies with a bigger investment in IT are looking for different ways to source their IT. The bigger guys are feeling a budget crunch more than anybody.”
According to Johnson, 60 percent of the average IT budget consists of fixed expenses, while 40 percent is variable costs. So when the budget is cut by 10 percent overall, variable costs, which are the only ones that can be cut, take a 25-percent hit.
Going forward, Jamcracker is not signing any deals under 100 seats, and the majority are between 300 and 3,000. “The number of customers we’re adding is slower, but the number of seats we’re adding is much higher. It’s a dramatic shift,” he said.
Another consequence of aiming higher in the market is a shift in the type of business Jamcracker’s customers are in, Johnson said. “When you get over 1,000 seats, the best targets are not tech-savvy companies. The best targets are those whose only reason to have an IT department is to make the IT systems run.
Most companies that sign up with one application on the platform will add a second application after 90 days, with an average of 3 to 4 applications per customer after 6 months. “When you get right down to it, if you’re only going to source one service, you’re not going to do it through Jamcracker,” Johnson said.
Jamcracker Enterprise offers Web-based services and applications that are deployed, managed and supported on a unified platform. The product offering includes 32 applications from 25 providers in a range of Web-based Services including Business, IT, Collaboration and Connectivity applications. An average of 5 to 8 applications are added every quarter, Johnson said.
“The goal is to find a solution for both enterprise and mid-market customers in a given application space, like Portera for enterprise and OpenAir for the mid-market in the PSA space,” he said.
