OpenMetal was a first-time Gold Sponsor at the SaaStr Annual 2022. We got the opportunity to meet with leaders at SaaS companies from around the world. And we got a chance to unveil our open source On-Demand Private Cloud product as a viable option for SaaS companies, especially those facing open/capex challenges with relation to public cloud consumption.
OpenMetal launched as an independent brand in February 2022. Prior to that, we had been incubating for a couple of years under InMotion Hosting as Flex Metal Cloud. OpenMetal’s flagship disruptor is an On-Demand Private Cloud built on OpenStack. It brings together all the desired features of a public cloud, (like on-demand availability and usage based billing), but within the secure confines of a fully customizable private cloud.
As we refined our target markets for this unique IaaS product offering, we found that SaaS providers were naturally gravitating towards us to resolve some common pain points like:
- The need to diversify cloud infrastructure
- The pain of huge and unpredictable public cloud bills
- Higher security requirements for proprietary data and processes
- Their customers not wanting their data/systems on public cloud, who they consider as a competitor
- Return to a commitment to supporting open source
Our customers’ successes, like this one, where an AI Chat Platform SaaS provider saved over 50% on IaaS costs by moving their DevOps workloads from AWS to OpenMetal, further bolstered our belief that our product is a fit for SaaS companies.
Serendipitously, (or maybe through the power of the all knowing Google Search algorithm), the SaaStr event popped up on our radar. We read reviews of past events and looked at the demographics of the attendees and knew we had found a match… the perfect watering hole, to get in front of our target audience of Decision Makers at SaaS companies.
Our team connected with the SaaStr events team, and the rest is history. We signed up for a Gold Sponsorship and got our core team members from the Sales, Marketing and Engineering teams to be at the in-person event, held in San Mateo from Sep 13-15.
Though the event organizers had given us a lot of information prior to the event, frankly we still were quite surprised when we got there. The easiest analogy that comes to mind is that it felt like the Coachella of B2B events.
The event was entirely outdoors sprawling over acres of land at the San Mateo County Convention Center. There was an entire section that was dedicated to the approx 150+ sponsors, all of us in open tents, and then there were larger tented areas for the talks, speeches and sessions. There were also designated areas in some covered structures, for BrainDates, where you could meet 1:1 or in small groups for pre-scheduled meetings and presentations. There were food trucks a-plenty and the food was delicious and free.
As sponsors, we did not have a chance to attend the sessions and talks, but the organizers did a great job of collating together great content and speakers, with names such as Anu Hariharan, Managing Director of YC Continuity l Y Combinator; Ben Chestnut, CEO l Mailchimp ; Brad Hoover, CEO l Grammarly; Elias Torres, Co-Founder and CTO l Drift; Michelle Benfer, SVP l HubSpot; and of-course Jason Lemkin, CEO & Founder l SaaStr. According to SaaStr, there were over 250 speakers from top SaaS companies from around the world and 150+ deep-dives, workshops, and classes.
There was a lot more going on at SaaStr that we probably won’t be able to cover here, but for the OpenMetal team, the most important and exciting part of SaaStr Annual 2022, were the people we met. The event attracted 10,000+ founders, decision makers and strategists from SaaS companies around the world. A number of VC’s were also in attendance. We got to meet hundreds of leaders of innovative technologies and services in the SaaS space and have in-depth technical and business discussions.
Some items that were validated for us about what we knew about the pain points for SaaS providers are:
- Most are avid supporters of open source technologies
- The pain of huge public cloud bills is real and a big impediment to the growth of their business
- They picked public cloud by default when they started, usually with free credits, and now the reality of the actual bills is overwhelming
- They were not aware of options available in the open source and private cloud space that can solve for their pain points around public cloud and complement their IaaS strategy
- They do not feel supported by the large mega clouds, even if their spend is in the millions of dollars a year
- With markets tightening and a possible recession looming, everyone is looking to find ways to optimize costs while simultaneously driving business growth
For the OpenMetal team, this was also the first in-person event after the past few isolating years of COVID, and we were grateful to be able to meet face-to face with potential customers.
There is a unique power in communicating and connecting with another human being in-person and SaaStr successfully helped facilitate that in more ways than one… including an evening of dancing away to D.J. DuMont’s mesmerizing beats.