Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Chris Sullens, CEO of Marathon Data Systems (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What trends are you seeing in your marketplace? Is the market penetrated at this point or is a lot of your customer base still on legacy systems?

Chris Sullens: There’s a lot of white space because of the new entrants and the capabilities of these small guys to now consume the technology. At the high-end, there is pretty high penetration where you have legacy solutions. The small companies have been doing things with white boards and spreadsheets and finding a good dispatcher who has it all in the head and leaning on that particular person to be their solution.

From that standpoint, there’s a lot of white space which is also the case from the field service side. More and more people are finding solutions for the market, but I would say that over half of our customers come to us with no system at all.

Sramana Mitra: I see. It’s their entry to the cloud without having gone on to any system at all.

Chris Sullens: Yes, because they can’t afford the implementation either in terms of time or spend. For us, the contrast is instead of using tens of thousands for implementation, we actually don’t have any implementation cost. We have support but they’re able to buy it, understand it, and use our training to get it up and running. That opens up a whole new level of the marketplace to a solution because smaller customers aren’t given pass because of their size.

Sramana Mitra: It seems like there is a lot of white space in bringing your solution into the fleet owner customer base from a pure technology adoption point of view. Do you see white space in terms of new product and technology areas that this market is looking for where an entrepreneur should be looking for opportunities?

Chris Sullens: That’s a good question. There’s definitely white spaces. You mentioned you have another one that’s focused on big data. That’s where we spend a lot of time thinking about. I would say that on the data and analytics side, there are opportunities, especially at the lower level. A lot of the providers today are not doing a really good job. That’s where you see a preponderance of data.

Even in the markets that we serve, it’s more important because they don’t have a whole team of analysts who are sitting around digging data out of the system and plugging it in to Excel and running miles. Any way that you can make their lives easier by cleaning up the information that they need is a good opportunity. We certainly provide that as part of our solution.

Sramana Mitra: Very good. Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Chris Sullens, CEO of Marathon Data Systems
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