Building a Global Technology Company from Australia: Avoka CEO Phil Copeland (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: I think there is that, but there’s also a process that you have articulated very clearly. We have seen this process come up many times. This process of following a product that is somewhat successful in the market and doing this kind of system integration and value-added reseller work on top of it so that you basically simmer in customer scenarios. Where the art comes in is to figure out which problem can give you enough of an opportunity to build a real product and a business out of it.

Phil Copeland: You learn as you go. The big waves that have changed over my 25 or 30 years is obviously that whole launch of the PC industry and the opportunities that it created and the client server computing revolution. These are big changes in the industry and have had major impacts. I missed out on the Internet revolution when it first came along, but then the launch of tablets and iPad just had a profound impact on the way that everybody does business.

Let me expand on that. This was really the thing that had created a huge opportunity for us. We were in a very interesting place. I can’t say it’s because we planned it all. It’s because we were in the right spot at the right time. If you’re a bank or government, your customers today have an expectation that doing business with you is as easy as doing business with Amazon. My elderly mother, who is of 80 years of age and had never picked up a computer in her life, got an iPad three years ago. Now, she’s an absolute wiz. S he’s not particularly mobile and she loves nothing better than spending time on her iPad either researching retirement villages or shopping on Amazon. The point is that so many people have now got used to the convenience and the ease of use of dealing with sites like Amazon that when they go to their bank and sign up for a wealth management product, they expect to be able to do that from the convenience of their lounge at home.

It’s creating a huge backlog of demand in those businesses to create and turn their business into digital business and to make it easy and convenient for their customers. Essentially, it’s a sales problem for them.

Sramana Mitra: The thing that you’re pointing to is another dimension in this process that is actually a pretty good process. When you are taking somebody else’s product and going into a market, choose a product that gives you action in a domain that has discontinuity—where things are changing, new technologies are coming in, and where there will be need and demand for new products and architecture.

Phil Copeland: It’s interesting as to how much vision you can have. When we started in the BPM space, we thought that there were a lot of sound principles behind that that we really liked a lot. One of the main things was that it empowered the business itself to take more control over a lot of their own processing, but we had no idea at all that we’d wind up where we were. There’s this stuff that happens along the way that you just have to recognize and be ready to react to that as well.

Sramana Mitra: In terms of customer acquisition, what was your primary strategy for the Avoka product?

Phil Copeland: We’ve always been focused on enterprise businesses—government, financial services, and banking in particular. We’ve always had a direct sales force. Where we’ve had to learn a lot is to be able to ramp up our demand generation and marketing skills. That’s been a big learning curve for us. We still have a direct sales force but we’re also finding that there are many partners that are services-oriented businesses who can see a lot of opportunity in this space. We’re starting to work through them as well. These days, we do a lot of demand generation work in marketing and we’ve invested a lot in marketing technology products to help us become good at doing that. It’s been good actually. It’s taken a while but the rate at which we’re creating new opportunities has just snowballed massively. In fact, one book that I’ve really enjoyed this year that I would recommend to anybody starting off in the tech industry today is a book by Aaron Ross called Predictable Revenue. He was actually the Head of Sales for Salesforce from 2002 to 2005. Predictable Revenue has really helped me a lot to build out our business model.

This segment is part 6 in the series : Building a Global Technology Company from Australia: Avoka CEO Phil Copeland
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