Bootstrapping A Software Company From Minnesota: Vicki Raport Of Quantum Retail (Part 6)

Sramana: What do you see for the future of Quantum?

Vicki Raport: We are trying to set our company up to be a next-generation player in retail technology and retail optimization. We are going to be the foundation of 21st-century retail transformation. We want to give retailers something they have never been able to do before, which is to align their capabilities to buy and sell merchandise when and where the consumer wants to shop in the most profitable way possible. We want technology that thinks like a business, which is different from the technology that powers the retail business today. Much of technology is designed around the way that technology behaves rather than how people want to work with technology.

Sramana: In the world of analytics and optimization, we have spent most of our time creating the infrastructure to be able to store and analyze heaps of data without the real business savvy and logic completely understood.

Vicki Raport: That is fundamental to everything about Quantum. At our heart, we deliver tremendous value for our customers. Everything we do with our technology is driven from an applied perspective.

We are committed to doing this in an enduring platform. That means it has to adapt to things over time. Not just our customer base but to the retailers’ customers. We will deliver on demand. Even the biggest retailers in the world are getting over the idea that they have to see the hardware. The future is going to be about how to make our service available on any device. People do not want to be tied to their desks. How will this all be running on a iPad? Then you really have to think about the problem differently.

Every piece of functionality we develop that we think is important is not important to every retailer. Retailers should select the aspects that best define how they work. The entire game is changing. It is not about being the smartest application. The truth is that a business must take what we have and apply its strategies and allow our system to learn and adapt over time. We are all about business strategies, interpreting them with smart science, and allowing our systems to seek out the best answer for business in an ever-changing environment.

Sramana: Do you work with any of the system integrators like Accenture or IBM Global Services?

Vicki Raport: We don’t in an exclusive manner, but we all have deep roots in Accenture. I managed the Retek–Accenture relationship for a while. We have worked with them and they have implemented us. Capgemini has worked with us, as have Cognizant, Online Resources, IBM, and Columbus Consulting. We have yet to take a specific integrator and given them a certified integrator, but we have worked with them in various forms.

Sramana: A lot of companies are interested in doing analytic functions in a private cloud. Have you run into that mindset yet?

Vicki Raport: Yes, we have. We are running a couple of our customers in the cloud already. We are building out our hosting infrastructure, which will have the capability to have dedicated hardware or on-demand private clouds.

This segment is part 6 in the series : Bootstrapping A Software Company From Minnesota: Vicki Raport Of Quantum Retail
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