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Deven Parekh
Managing Director- Insight Venture Partners
Wednesday, August 1, 2012
Deven Parekh
Deven Parekh, Managing Director at Insight Venture Partners, joined the firm in 2000. Founded in 1995, New York based Insight Venture Partners is a global growth equity fund which has raised more than $5 billion and invested in more than 150 growth-stage software, eCommerce, internet, and data-services companies.

Current Trend

In the e-commerce sector, the market in the U.S. is more mature. You have a large competitor such as Amazon. Thus, we are looking more at the next generation e-commerce investment in the U.S. It is important for them to have some category differentiation or a new or innovative way to leverage market with new channels in order to compete successfully. Today, we find more interesting investments in e-commerce internationally than the U.S.

In SaaS model, we are seeing a lot of interesting companies. We see these companies boost when horizontal players define themselves, as the participating multiple verticals offer better horizontal functionality, for example, Buddy Media, a company that we recently sold to Salesforce.com. They provide social media management as a SaaS solution to large organizations across multiple verticals. In vertical application, the world is moving toward cloud-based delivery. Five or ten years ago, the large enterprises had a lot of hesitation about enterprise apps that were not sitting behind their own parallel. Now we see that hesitation is significantly lessened and people are more comfortable with cloud-based solutions even for mission critical applications.

In data space, data is moving towards cloud-based delivery with data solutions. There are lots of interesting examples; one of our largest investments till date is in a company called Drillinginfo, which provides data to oil and gas businesses to help make better decisions on where to spend their capital. This is a business that leverages lot of trends in the cloud-based delivery, big data and the ability to provide analytics on top of these data to make decisions.


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