For over ten years, the reservation management software company has been helping diners make appointments at their favorite digs. For the past three years before they filed their IPO in 2009, OpenTable had grown revenues at a compound annual rate of about 43%. This was due to a solid business model rooted in software-as-a-service (SaaS), where the company would lease its equipment to restaurants and charge them $1-per-seat fees for each reservation booked on OpenTable.com. Much like other SaaS vendors who market toward the enterprise, OpenTable represents one of the most recent examples of enterprise capabilities merging with consumer apps in the cloud.
Despite the initial skepticism of launching an IPO during the deeper end of the recession in 2009, the company has made remarkable gains in the market, trading at 82% higher than its IPO price of $20 and giving the company a market cap of $1.19 billion. Looking forward it seems like an acquisition for OpenTable would be a likely avenue. The company has been struggling with their foreign operations and could be in the market to pick up local foreign sites that understand the business and marketing approach of those countries.