Wednesday, April 23, 2008By: Des Cahill, CEO
It's an exciting time in Silicon Valley and spring is in the air. The fruit trees, the ones that haven't been replaced by buildings housing start-ups, are in full blossom. Habeas' headquarters are located just a stone's throw from such iconic companies as Google, Apple and In & Out Burger. The ongoing tussle between Yahoo! and Microsoft is keeping the Valley blogs buzzing. Judging by the recent San Francisco ad:tech and Google's earnings report, Silicon Valley companies in the interactive marketing space are not feeling the effects of any recession. The energy and optimism of the Valley springs eternal.
And it's truly an exciting time at Habeas. We're growing our customer and partner base rapidly -- revenue growth for 2008 is more than 50% year over year. We hit or exceeded all our financial targets in the first quarter of 2008. Habeas recently announced partnership deals with eleven and Cloudmark to extend our SafeList coverage and reputation data network. We've launched major enhancements to our software platform to deliver blazing speed, add new reputation data sources and increase overall capacity for our growing customer base. While I could look back in amazement at the progress in the company from 4.5 years ago when Chuck and I re-started the company (we used to have a haiku?), there isn't any time for that. We're too busy looking ahead. And what we see is exciting.
Online reputation management (previously known as: accreditation, whitelisting, email deliverability...) is ever more critical in a world where the Internet and email have increasing importance in the global economy, yet online crime and exploits like spam, phishing, keylogging and malware continue to grow. We're proud to be the only company solely focused on online reputation management services. We've successfully been building a trusted brand, great group of employees and a sophisticated reputation network and technology platform since 2003.
There's been some chatter about Habeas as of late. Here's the deal. Habeas, like some of our competitors and many leading email companies, is venture backed. Venture backed companies talk to each other all the time about partnering, investing, etc. Those discussions are often facilitated by investment bankers. Habeas is working with a firm called William Blair. They're helping us look at our options to finance the continued growth of our business. There are many options available to Habeas to do so and these guys are the experts -- they know email and SaaS (software as a service) business models. William Blair has worked with Constant Contact on their recent IPO as well as the S-1 filings of both Exact Target and Convio.
Those projects that William Blair has been involved in underscore a key point -- email and interactive marketing industries are hot areas now and going forward. Habeas believes in the current and long-term importance of reputation services to the overall health and sustainability of the email and interactive marketing industries. We're proud to be a unique leader in this area and to be managing the growth and capabilities of the company to best serve our customers and partners. Onward!
