Enterprise 3.0 In The Supply Chain: GT Nexus Cofounder Greg Johnsen (Part 5)

Sramana: I think product marketing is one of the most interesting aspects of your company. Somebody has done a phenomenally good job of managing product marketing here. You have a very powerful concept. What is the secret sauce?

Greg Johnsen: There are companies that do not put a premium on product marketing. We do. Once you decide you are going to be a product marketing company you are already there. The next step is to make that team accountable for more than just reacting to market trends and building products. They are truly a product strategy team. Beyond that I think our key is that we have great people and we are in a big space.

When we hire into product marketing, we are looking for product managers that are specialized. We have this issue where we are so close to a domain that we do not need to build a generic horizontal. We need people who are familiar with the domain, and they must be strong product marketing people. We have the patience to wait for the right people.

We have the same challenge in sales. We need software sales people who know how to handle strategic, highly competitive deals. That is different from any other type of sales. They did not know the lingo of process automation. We need them combined with logistics sales guys who are great at relationships and know the process but had to go through all kinds of target account selling training to get smart on defensive and offensive strategies. We have to merge those domains into a single sales person.

Sramana: How has the business ramped?

Greg Johnsen: Our first enterprise customer was Hewlett-Packard in 2000. We have about 400 people in the company now, and we grow at a rate of 30 percent a year. That is a healthy growth rate, and we would like to see it grow more. In some ways we think this business is a candidate for a hockey stick picture. It took a long time to get to 120 anchor tenant customers, which brought in their partners. Now that we have 3PLs bringing in their customers we think we will see the results of having engineered a unique business model that can grow very fast.

Sramana: The preparation phase for a hockey-stick model requires patience because it can be a bit long.

Greg Johnsen: Especially when you combine that with a business model that does not pick up software license revenue all in one chunk instead collecting over time. That makes navigation a bit difficult. You have to stay small.

Sramana: Essentially it has taken a decade to get to 10 million, but you expect it to go much faster in the next phase.

Greg Johnsen: That is our expectation. We can measure growth based on the number of organizations that are plugged into our network. We also measure links between our partners. We are talking about value and context between trading partners.

Sramana: How do you handle security when you are creating a marketplace for multiple vendors, some of which may end up being direct competitors?

Greg Johnsen: It’s incredibly efficient to put the data set at the hub and give the entire community access to it, but in this business, the innovation is really about how to do that while also honoring the real-world business policies and rules between trading partners. Supplier A should see only the data in the POs for Supplier B. Carrier G should be able to provide updates for shipments only where Carrier G is the carrier of record. And so on. We’ve made significant investments in the infrastructure that ensures data access and data security are well managed.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Enterprise 3.0 In The Supply Chain: GT Nexus Cofounder Greg Johnsen
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