If cost and convenience aren’t enough to lure companies away from capital expenditure and hardware toward operating expenditure and cloud-based software, here’s another reason. Subscription-based software makers pretty much have to take customer feedback seriously to stave off all-too-easy cancellations. The result is a product that slavishly caters to customer whims, according to Steve De Marco (pictured), chief revenue officer of AppExtremes LLC (dba Conga).

Like many in the software business, De Marco began his career hustling perpetual licenses to customers. “We would go and try to get a big check up front,” he said. “Whether the customer used the software or not — we didn’t care; we got all our money up front.”

The growing software as a service market couldn’t be more different. “SaaS really puts the power in the customers hands, because you don’t get all that money upfront,” he said. Customers pay for a subscription that they can cut off the second a vendor annoys them. “That’s a very powerful concept,” De Marco added.

DeMarco spoke with Jeff Frick (@JeffFrick), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the Conga Connect West event in San Francisco. They discussed how the pressure of the subscription model shaped Conga. (* Disclosure below.)

Customer control pays off

Vendors like Conga — a contract life-cycle management suite in Salesforce.com Inc.’s ecosystem — run a treadmill of perpetual product improvements to keep customers happy period after period.

Salesforce was a pioneer of the SaaS delivery model, according to De Marco, who’s been in the Salesforce ecosystem with one company or another for 13 years. The company has actually baked Conga into some of its own products, which goes to show how well-honed Conga has become.

“I’ve known them now for 12, 15 years — they don’t do that,” he said. “You can count on one hand how many partners they’ve actually baked into their product set, and so it’s a special relationship we have with Salesforce. We’re proud of it,” De Marco concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Conga Connect West event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Conga Connect West at Dreamforce 2018. Neither Conga, the event sponsor, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE