Published on the 15/03/2016 | Written by Beverley Head
Cloud based insight platform Qualtrics has made Sydney its Asia Pacific headquarters and slated its ambition to grow its workforce and triple local sales during 2016…
Bill McMurray, managing director for Asia Pacific and Japan, said that Qualtrics had secured 200 regional customers through a programme of cold calling before it decided to open a Sydney office in January 2015, initially with three people. It now has a team of 50 serving 450 clients in the region and according to McMurray that will rise to 70 by September.
The company has a local data centre – forming one of three international hubs that the company operates – which was important to meet prospects’ data sovereignty concerns he said.
McMurray said that the 50 staff were split evenly between sales and service, the latter particularly important for a SaaS business, he said, as disgruntled customers would simply turn off the service.
Speaking via video link the company’s founder and CEO Ryan Smith, explained how the company had seeded demand for its product by encouraging its use among academics and students. It’s a leaf out of the Unix playbook which gained popularity when the code was made freely available to students who then demanded access to Unix when they entered the workforce.
The system – which Smith described as being able to “democratise research” – has been rolled out in 1,800 universities worldwide and has 1.6 million students and academics trained in its use. Latterly the system has been deployed in corporates as an insight and consumer sentiment engine.
In Australia the company claims 80 per cent of universities use the system and three of the four big banks.
The company, which was originally built by bootstrapping – where sales pay for the next round of company investment and growth – has had a couple of rounds of external investment and is now classed as a “unicorn” – a privately held company which is nonetheless valued at US$1 billion.
Smith acknowledged that the current rethink about the true value of some unicorn companies, which was now underway in the US, was having an impact on the broader tech sector.
“I feel really bad for a lot of young tech companies,” which were now finding it somewhat harder to attract investors.
“We start to see the beginning of a major shift. Some (unicorns) are failing to meet their numbers. Raising money is easy – but then you’ve got to perform.”
He also warned that there were pitfalls that arose for companies seeking big valuations as the ultimate prize. “If you optimise for a big valuation, it’s a bit like taking out a mortgage on a home that is much more than you can afford.”
Qualtrics, he said, was instead focused on a “long shelf life, and a long runway” to any sort of exit strategy. Clearly a fan of the approach taken by Sydney’s Atlassian which only recently listed on the NYSE, Smith said that Atlassian had always been around 18 months ahead of Qualtrics.
