Thought Leaders in Outsourcing: Interview with John Meyer, CEO of Arise Virtual Solutions (Part 1)

John Meyer is the CEO of Arise Virtual Solutions, a leading company in the outsourcing/crowdsourcing industry. Arise connects individuals and companies with other companies to provide services such as customer service, sales, or technical service. John has previously served as CEO for Acxiom and as president of the Global Services group of Alcatel-Lucent, and he has more than 28 years of leadership experience. He holds an MBA from the University of Missouri and a BS in management from Pennsylvania State University. In this interview he goes into detail about Arise’s activity in the outsourcing industry, explaining how Arise helps companies find people to do part or all of their call center needs and the selection process involved with it. He also give us a few interesting stories of individuals who managed to grow a multimillion dollar business from scratch.

Sramana Mitra: John, let’s start with some of your personal background as well some background on Arise Virtual Solutions.

John Meyer: I have been in the outsourcing industry for almost 32 years. I started in the military myself, and started with a paramilitary organization called EDS. That was in the days when Ross Perot founded EDS under the idea that computer services were going to be as important as the technology. We were a small company back then. I was employee number 6,000 and subsequently it grew to almost 150,000 people. After that I was running the European operations out of London. On the way back to the headquarters, I got discovered by Pat Russo from Lucent. Pat’s vision was that what had happened in the equipment industry and computers was going to happen in the telecom equipment industry and that the value of services was going to gain in prominence. She convinced me, and it turned out to be a great success in creating a services business inside Lucent with Bell Labs. That grew into a worldwide business of almost $5.5 billion after we merged with Alcatel and the headquarters moved to France. Subsequent to that I ran a company called Acxiom. Acxiom is a big database company. The place I am at now is called Arise Virtual Solutions.

SM: What is Arise Virtual Solutions?

JM: It started as a company about 16 years ago with the idea that there is a latent workforce that happened to be disabled. It was a joint venture between Bellsoft and the state of Florida to provide jobs for people. The nature of that workforce is that its members couldn’t physically go to one place. Most, if not all of the interactions you had with these people, had to be done virtually. The idea was to certify them, make sure they had certain capabilities and skills, make sure that they had the technical infrastructure. Then they had to make sure the company had the technical infrastructure to route calls to those people directly.

It is very similar to 1M/1M. We create entrepreneurs. We have almost 26,000 independent business owners who have set up a legal entity and who have contracted with us. We subsequently contract with Fortune 2000 companies – three out of the top four telecom companies in America, three out of the five top e-commerce companies in America, the largest cable provider in the U.K., second largest telecom company in Canada, and so on. We have a group of almost 60 customers who provide opportunities to these independent business owners to do things like technical support, cross-sales, upselling, or customer service. We created 26,000 independent businesses.

This segment is part 1 in the series : Thought Leaders in Outsourcing: Interview with John Meyer, CEO of Arise Virtual Solutions
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