Concept-Financing $8.5 Million: Gaurav Rewari, CEO of Numerify (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What year does that bring us up to?

Gaurav Rewari: That brings us to 2012.

Sramana Mitra: That was pretty recently.

Gaurav Rewari: Yes, but that startup bug I alluded to earlier hadn’t quite left me. It started biting me quite hard again. Our respective product lines at Oracle were doing really well. They were either number one or number two in each category. I looked out and I really felt like the enterprise landscape was changing on an epic scale right in front of my eyes. Specifically, what I felt very strongly about was the rise of the cloud delivery model. It was creating significant upheaval in a lot of established IT buying categories. We saw it play out in CRM with the rise of Salesforce.com and HCM with the rise of Workday. I began to ask myself, “What impact is this going to have on analytics?” Analytics has always been a secondary market. The idea is that if you can stroll into a company like we did in the mid 90s at MicroStrategy, you would see a lot of on-premise software.

The value proposition in BI used to be, “You got data that’s trapped in siloed applications. If you want to get one view of your customers, your employees, or a product, you need to be able to pull data together from these underlying systems into a data warehouse, and stick a BI tool on top of it. That was really the core value proposition of the BI and analytics space. Then there was a class of companies that emerged that said, “It’s a lot of hard work building this warehouse, doing that ETL, creating the data model, and putting a BI tool on top. What if, for chosen domains like finance, sales, or marketing, we do a tailored, pre-built application that bolted on top of Siebel and gave you targeted analytics for the office of the CFO or for the VP of Sales?” Hyperion was one example of a company like that. Oracle BI apps was another example. I found that value proposition very compelling in the on-premise world.

As I looked at the cloud world in 2012, what I was seeing was a proliferation of cloud operation application companies whether it’s a Salesforce, Marketo, or Eloqua, but I wasn’t seeing anything equivalent at the analytical tier. If I don’t create it, someone else will. I felt strongly enough about that to take the plunge. That was the first reason for doing this. The second was I felt like there were genuine advances that could be made in terms of how these BI or analytical applications are built that allowed them to be more resilient to changes in the underlying operational applications.

Historically, these BI applications were built in a way that was pretty rigid. The coding of the data transformation tended to be procedural. We felt that for known domains, we could actually automate a lot of the data warehouse and BI layer creation. We set about doing that. In the long run, we think it gives a company economic advantages in terms of how quickly you can spin up a BI app and how gracefully it can accommodate underlying changes in operational applications. This could be very mundane changes like adding new columns or it could be significant changes. That was the second piece of the puzzle. Then the third piece of the puzzle is picking a domain. Are you going to pick CRM or HCM? There we made a choice that was a little bit contrarian, but it’s been working very well for us. We certainly knew that cloud-based BI applications would have their place under the sun. Also, we felt strongly that these new BI applications needed to be built in a different way. So the domain we chose to pick was BI applications for the IT business.

Sramana Mitra: What drove that choice? That’s a very interesting decision.

Gaurav Rewari: I had a set of conversations with a bunch of people. One of the companies that really impressed me on a couple of cards was ServiceNow.

Sramana Mitra: We’ve covered ServiceNow on this series.

Gaurav Rewari: Fred?

Sramana Mitra: Yes.

Gaurav Rewari: He’s an incredible entrepreneur. What really impressed me about ServiceNow were the following few things. Number one, a lot of times you see cloud applications as being replacement categories for existing on-premise categories. There was sales automation on-premise and now sales automation in the cloud. There’s marketing automation on-premise and then marketing automation in the cloud. Fair enough, ServiceNow was the cloud equivalent of on-premise IT service management software. In yesteryears, you may have heard of BMC, Remedy, and HPC. That was true.

What I thought was unique about ServiceNow was not only were they replacing an existing category, they were re-imagining it. They were re-imagining it in two very unique and interesting ways. The first way is that they were saying that the time has come not just for IT service management software, but an ERP for IT. For some reason, IT never had ERP. Yet, IT does a range of complex things that are fairly consistent from one type of company to the next.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Concept-Financing $8.5 Million: Gaurav Rewari, CEO of Numerify
1 2 3 4 5 6 7