Trends And Opportunities In Cloud Computing: Jim Burleigh, CEO Of Cloud9 (Part 5)

Sramana: What did you do after you left Navis, and what timeframe was that?

Jim Burleigh: I left Navis in early 2007. One of the things I started inside of Navis was a SaaS inventory warehouse management system. We had a very large deal with Walmart for them to manage the yards around Walmart facilities; it was a massive yard management system. To optimize it, we needed to get information about what was coming in. A lot of Walmart supplies come from small warehouses, and they could not get good information from small warehouses because they did not have technology or a system. Those small warehouses could not afford the traditional infrastructure.

When we sold to Zebra I took that SaaS division and spun it off. I went and got some capital from some VCs and grew a business called SmartTurn, which was a SaaS warehouse inventory management system. We sold to small and medium warehouses. These folks all knew Manhattan and RedPrairie, but those options were much too expensive for them. Our main competitor was Microsoft Excel.

The interesting thing is that when you have a large 3PL they have a mix of RedPrairie, Manhattan, and SAP across the board but they would have nothing for their small and medium warehouses. Even though there were licenses on the shelf from the big companies those small warehouses could not afford to install the software. It was just too much. That was the hole that we filled. I ran that business for three years and then we sold it to RedPrairie. I stayed on after the sale to help with the transition and then I moved on to Cloud9.

Sramana: What is the story behind Cloud9 ,and why did you move there?

Jim Burleigh: Cloud9 was founded in 2007. The core of the company is to build SaaS analytic applications. If you think of all the applications used in business out there, you will find they are record-keeping applications. They simply record your notes. That is what the CRM and warehouse systems do. If you can look at the business intelligence market, you will see that you learn from the data and it helps you make decisions. The idea behind Cloud9 is to combine CRM and BI into a single application.

The first place we are focused is CRM. In the CRM space we are focused on pipeline and forecast management. We have a robust BI and analytics environment under the covers, but that is not what the customer interacts with. The customer interacts with forecasting and pipeline management. In that process we inform them of deals which can be on- or off-model. Forecasts can be reasonable or unreasonable. Territories can have change that is expected or unexpected. Using the pattern of history and success about how a deal in a particular vertical behaves we can see if current activities are on or off model. This is a tool to help a sales manager be better at his or her job.

Sramana: You are selling to a VP of sales?

Jim Burleigh: We sell to the VP of sales and VP of sales operations.

Sramana: Do you plug into all the existing CRMs?

Jim Burleigh: Yes, we pull the data from there. The interesting bit is that we pull the data from the CRM, but any change you make we will note it. We have built a time version database, and we store everything. We have a complete history of your activities. That helps us look at the patterns. It is a tremendous amount of knowledge. CRMs do not keep history.

Sramana: What does your software dashboard look like? If I were a VP of sales, what would I see?

Jim Burleigh: We want to help increase win-rates and help you get better utilities out of your resources. A lower level result is to provide more accurate forecasts. People will always take a higher win rate over a more accurate forecast, no question. However, the process of forecasting is what brings out exceptions and opportunities. The key is that forecasting should help you get a higher win rate. You make a prediction, measure against it, and see how you are doing. In many cases that is done in people’s heads or in spreadsheets. The benefits in a daily life cycle are that the sales manager can go to their dashboard and see the exceptions that they need to pay attention to. It can be any deals that have gone off track. That can be complex because off track and off model can mean a lot of things.

I have forecasts, pipeline totals by pipeline, and I can see the good and bad of all the areas. That is analytics at an aggregate level. They can drill down on any detail they want to. We take the forecast from a rep and rate it with risk for the managers. That is configurable to use analytics to dig into the details and measure it against the forecast.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Trends And Opportunities In Cloud Computing: Jim Burleigh, CEO Of Cloud9
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