Bootstrapping Using Services: Evariant CEO Bill Moschella (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: In terms of your own customer acquisition, is it all direct selling? Do you have a field sales force?

Bill Moschella: Yes, we have field sales and partner channel as well. We have an awesome partner channel team who are from Cloudera, Microsoft, and Oracle. They are now on-board and doing an amazing job.

Sramana Mitra: In terms of your organization, are you still headquartered in Connecticut?

Bill Moschella: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: How big is the company in terms of team?

Bill Moschella: At this point, we’re probably around 200 people all over the country.

Sramana Mitra: Your development is all in Connecticut?

Bill Moschella: We just opened our office in Austin. Our platform engineering and partner engineering team is down there. Our corporate headquarters are in Farmington and our marketing is in Boston. Then, we have our customer service in Chicago. There are about two dozen people there.

Sramana Mitra: What’s the thinking? It’s an unusual split.

Bill Moschella: In general, a lot of the business can be run from anywhere. The founders are here, so the majority of the management is here. Boston is barely an hour away. It’s an unbelievable hub of talent.

Sramana Mitra: Boston doesn’t surprise me. It’s more the Chicago that surprises me and, to some extent, Austin.

Bill Moschella: You have to understand that the healthcare systems are spread all over the country. There’s a huge pocket of hospitals in the Midwest. Texas is a massive hub of health systems. Not to mention Austin as far as Big Data engineering is concerned. There’s an awesome talent pool down there. It’s a strategic choice. A lot of our core healthcare experts are out of that area in Chicago.

Sramana Mitra: In terms of ramping the company, what are some strategic moves that you made that are worth discussing in this conversation?

Bill Moschella: The analytics piece and the Big Data piece that drives the engagement just has massive opportunity. We feel that there is probably close to a $40 billion opportunity between now and 2017 just for engagement analytics. To achieve that, you have to expand your business model.

This year, we started working with a number of partners like Dell and Accenture as examples of organizations that are now delivering services on our platform. They’re taking it. They’re deploying, servicing, and maintaining it. The partner strategy is a big piece of where we’re going. We don’t see a lot of our competitors in this market going that route. They’re trying to own all the services and solutions on their own. It’s just not scalable. You have to have a partner strategy. You can’t own all the ideas.

Sramana Mitra: Your partner strategy is the major system integration businesses out there—the Accentures and the IBM Global.

Bill Moschella: Yes, correct.

Sramana Mitra: Any other major strategic point that you want to highlight?

Bill Moschella: Like I said, the analytics piece. It’s going to be a big thing.

Sramana Mitra: What metrics do you want to share in terms of how you’re doing?

Bill Moschella: Revenue for software subscriptions have more than doubled each year for the past two years. Also, our headcount has grown 144% over last year.

Sramana Mitra: Great! It was a pleasure talking to you.

This segment is part 6 in the series : Bootstrapping Using Services: Evariant CEO Bill Moschella
1 2 3 4 5 6