Kevin Dobbs

By Mark Stelzner

Kevin is the founder of Montclair Advisors, a leading strategic advisory firms exclusively focused on assisting software companies with the business side of Software-as-a-Service. For the last 20 years Kevin has held executive positions with public and private software firms with operational responsibility for sales, marketing, business development, product and corporate strategy.

He is an Oracle alumni who started his technology career working for industry icons like Marc Benioff, Craig Conway, Terry Garnett, and Chris Greendale inside of various marketing functions including managing Oracle’s lead generation group that lead’s for Tom Siebel’s inside sales team.

Kevin has focused his career on how to use enterprise application software as a catalyst for transformational business change inside of all sizes of organizations. Some of his big ideas include launching the largest shared services financial application platform which IBM benchmarked at over 150,000 concurrent users, rolling out the first self-service human resources platform to the market, creating the largest employee portal for GM and DaimlerChrysler and launching the market’s first SaaS-based talent management suite platform and transitioning several software firms to SaaS.

One area of Kevin’s long-term interests has been delivering easy-to-use business applications over the Internet for all types of end users. Kevin has transitioned several firms to a SaaS business model, and based on his unique perspectives of the software market, it became clear that there was an interesting market opportunity. Although there was not only a need for a technology perspective when delivering SaaS, but there is an equally important aspect which are the best practices on how to run a successful SaaS business, which led Kevin to form Montclair Advisors.

Prior to Montclair Advisors, Kevin was SVP at Workstream, one of the early providers of SaaS-based Talent Management software. Kevin was responsible for company’s product strategy that included the development and launching of the industry’s first SaaS-based Talent Managements suite - TalentCenter™. Kevin also oversaw and integrated a number of Workstream’s acquisitions including Bravanta, HRSoft, ProAct Technologies and Exxceed.

Prior to Workstream, Kevin held senior management positions in the marketing, business development and product marketing at Kadiri, Workscape, Edify, Walker Interactive and Oracle Corporation.

Kevin is an active member of the SaaS and HCM communities, having spoken at many industry conferences, events, user groups, forums and seminars. Kevin has been cited in dozens of publications and is the primary author of the popular Smart SaaS blog, drawing thousands of readers per month covering leading firms such as Taleo, SuccessFactors and Workday as well as sector analysis of SMB financial services and office productivity tools.

Kevin is a graduate of the University of Oregon and resides in Oakland, California with his wife and three sons. Kevin can be reached at kevin@montclairadvisors.com This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

Mark Stelzner is Founder and Managing Partner at Inflexion Advisors and Founder of JobAngels.org.