AB’s Unicorn company has pioneered high-performance Kubernetes-native object storage, helping enterprises use the cloud operating model to determine where to run their workloads – depending on what they are optimizing for. 

As a Series B company, MinIO has $126 million in funding raised to date, with a billion dollar valuation. Investors include Intel Capital, Softbank Vision Fund 2, Dell Technologies Capital, Nexus Venture Partners, General Catalyst and key angel investors.

As one of the leading proponents and thinkers on the subject of open source software, AB is able to masterfully articulate differences between philosophy and business models – and how the two create cloud function.

M.R. Rangaswami: Can you explain all this chatter about cloud repatriation?

AB Periasamy: Simply put, the concept of “cloud repatriation” is repatriating workloads from public clouds to a private cloud. For years, the mantra of the cloud was fairly straightforward: put everything in the public cloud and keep it there forever. This model made sense as businesses optimized for elasticity, developer agility, service availability and flexibility. 

Things changed when businesses reached scale, however, as the benefits were swamped by economics and lock-in. This is leading many enterprises to re-think their approach to the cloud – with a focus on the operating model of the cloud – not where it runs. 

It’s important to remember the cloud operating model has a cycle. There are times to leverage the public cloud. There are times to leverage the private cloud. There are times to leverage the colo model. Given the ecosystem that has built up around the cloud – there is certainly self-interest in driving enterprise workloads in that direction – there are the consulting fees to get you there and the consulting fees to manage costs once you realize it is more expensive than forecasted. Nonetheless, sophisticated enterprises are increasingly taking their own counsel on determining what is best for the business – and that is driving the repatriation discussion. 

M.R.: What are the key principles of the cloud operating model?

AB: The cloud is not a physical location anymore. Today, the tooling and skill set that was once the dominion of AWS, GCP and Azure, is now available everywhere. Kubernetes is not confined to the public cloud distributions of EKS, GKE and AKS – there are dozens of distributions. MinIO, for example, works in the public cloud, private cloud and the edge. The building blocks of the cloud run anywhere.

Developers know this. It is why they have become the engine of value creation in the enterprise. They know the cloud is about engineering principles, things like containerization, orchestration, microservices, software-defined everything, RESTful APIs and automation.  

Understanding these principles and understanding that they operate just as effectively outside of the public cloud creates true optionality and freedom. There is no “one” answer here – but with the cloud operating model as the guide, enterprises create optionality. Optionality is good.

M.R.: How has the cloud lifecycle changed and is repatriation the answer?

AB: Early cloud native adopters quickly learned principles of the cloud. Over time, workloads grew and costs ballooned. The workloads and principles were no longer novel – but the cost to support the workloads at scale was.

For enterprises, it has become clear that the value has been inverted by the costs of remaining on the cloud. This is the lifecycle of the cloud. You extract the agility, elasticity, and flexibility value, then you turn your attention to economics and operational acuity.

Repatriation is but one tool. There are many. It is really about optimization. What you are optimizing for should help determine where you should run your workload. At MinIO, we are agnostic, you can find us in every cloud marketplace (AWS, Azure, GCP, IBM). You can find us on every Kubernetes distribution (EKS, GKS, AKS, OpenShift, Tanzu, Rafay). That is the definition of multi-cloud. 

We talk about balancing needs and optimizing for workloads. Again, some workloads are born in the public cloud. Some workloads grow out of it. Others are just better on the private cloud. It will depend. 

What matters is that when your organization is committed to the principles of the cloud operating model you have the flexibility to decide and with that comes leverage. And who doesn’t like a little leverage – especially in today’s economy.

M.R. Rangaswami is the Co-Founder of Sandhill.com

As we round the corner on the first quarter of 2023, we thought it would be an appropriate time to check in and review Software Equity Group’s Annual Report.

According to SEG’s report, SaaS continues to be an attractive asset class for private equity and strategic buyers. M&A deal volume in 2022 surpassed 2,000 transactions for the first time, a 21% increase over 2021.

Private equity buyers with record amounts of dry powder drove volume and valuations, comprising nearly 60% of SaaS M&A deals, a record for annual activity, and accounted for some of the highest multiples in 2022.

Public market indices across the board struggled to overcome the tumultuous macroeconomic landscape of 2022. While multiples continued to decline from the unsustainable run-up in 2021 (14.7x), public SaaS companies in the SEG SaaS Index demonstrated operational resiliency. The median EV/Revenue multiple sat 15% higher than 2018’s pre-pandemic levels, which were considered healthy at the time. What’s more, recent indicators show inflation moderating and the potential easing of interest rate hikes, which should bode well for SaaS multiples going forward.

Here are 5 summary points to note:

1. Private equity capital overhang and fierce strategic competition catalyzed SaaS M&A activity and buoyed EV/Revenue multiples
   in 2022, despite broader macroeconomic turbulence.
   
2. SaaS M&A deal volume remains near peak levels, reaching 2,157 deals in 2022 and growing 21% over 2021.
   
3. The median EV/Revenue multiple for SaaS deals jumped to 5.6x in 4Q22, surpassing the median SEG SaaS Index public market multiple of 5.4x. Buyers and investors paying a premium for high-quality assets bolstered valuation multiples for SaaS M&A in 2022.
   
4. Private equity-driven deals accounted for the highest percentage of transactions to date on an annual basis (59.5%) due to the record amount of capital raised demanding deployment to worthy assets.
   
5. Noteworthy deals include Adobe’s acquisition of Figma ($20B), Vista Equity’s acquisition of Citrix ($16.5B), and ICE’s acquisition of Black Knight ($16B).

Click here to view SEG’s full 2023 SaaS Report:

M.R. Rangaswami is the Co-Founder of Sandhill.com

Sharing his on his list what organisations must pay attention to when it comes to their security, Kandji’s VP of Security and Trust, Dom Lombardi, details how organizations can stay one step ahead of this year’s risks, threats and potential attacks.

M.R. Rangaswami: With the higher risk of infrastructure attacks, what will be the biggest thing to stay ahead of to avoid a concerted effort of attacks against organizations?

Dom Lombardi: Attackers will continue to become more creative in their pursuits. It has been reported that about 25% of all data breaches involve phishing and 82% of breaches involve a human element. Many of the security controls we put in place earlier are at risk of being bypassed due to human error. Financially motivated cybercriminals will concentrate on corporate entities, where they will try to derive personal identifiable information (PII) or customer payment card information.

Further, “strategic viability” attacks against critical infrastructure systems will continue to increase. Think oil pipelines, power generation, rail systems, electricity production, or industrial manufacturing. There is still the possibility that key government or corporate services could be targeted — something tied to global tensions.

M.R. Why is it important for companies to prioritize Zero Trust in their cybersecurity
plans?

Dom: Security teams have been talking about the zero-trust cybersecurity approach for a few years. It used to be “trust, but verify.” The new zero trust — in a workplace filled with multiple teams, multiple devices, and multiple locations — is “check, check again, then trust in order to verify.”

Organizations continue to play a cat-and-mouse game with hackers, attackers, and bad actors. Only 6% of enterprise organizations have fully implemented zero trust, according to a 2022 Forrester Research study.

The complex and disparate workplace environments that are so common now make it difficult to adopt zero trust — at least all at once. If you are using AWS, Azure, and GCP with an on-premise instance along with a private cloud where you are running virtualization through VMware — that will take
some time to uniformly roll everything out.

As we all continue to embark on the zero trust journey, we will see new solutions for complex problems companies are experiencing on premise and in public and private clouds. By mastering basic IT (and security) hygiene, updating and communicating your risk register (a manual that outlines current and potential security risks and how they could impact the organization), and working steadily toward a zero-trust security model, you’ll be one step ahead of most other organizations — and hopefully two steps ahead of the hackers!

M.R.: As companies continue to build their security plans, how will the role of the CISO
expand at organizations?

Dom: The CISO can also (continuously) champion the risk register to ensure they receive needed resources to remediate and reduce risk on an ongoing basis. Keep in mind that new threats, risks, and updates will always populate your risk register. It is critical to actively work to remediate against this list to prevent risks from escalating and becoming even more complicated.

Additionally, to prevent miscommunication and promote total transparency, any CISO who does not report directly to the CEO should demand that they do — immediately. Organizations need to take a risk-conscious approach to developing their security program and risk mitigation strategies.

A CISO must report to the CEO to ensure direct lines of communication regarding risk scenarios and potential loss events. CEOs are ultimately accountable for the course of action they set the organization on, and CISOs provide the CEO with the direction and guidance to make informed, risk-conscious decisions.

To set themselves up for success, CISOs should ensure that the general counsel at their organization is in their “peer set.” This relationship with your general counsel is integral to a unified approach to legal and security risk mitigation. The organization’s general counsel and CISO share a common goal: to keep the company, their customers, and the organization’s leaders safe.

M.R. Rangaswami is the Co-Founder of Sandhill.com

Idit Levine, is the founder and CEO of the unicorn service mesh platform, Solo.io.

Some say that it was her professional basketball career that gave her the drive to develop such a successful enterprise. Others report her success should be attributed to her ability to self-teach solution-based skills. Likely, it’s both.

Idit’s dialled-in focus for how enterprises can connect hard-to-change, tested applications with more modern, flexible microservices and service mesh is worthy of her organisation’s 1 Billion Dollar Valuation.

M.R. Rangaswami: Modern enterprise infrastructure and next gen technologies such as modern cloud native and microservices have basically eliminated the perimeter, so how has this affected security as a whole?

Idit Levine: Not so long ago, a perimeter separated a company’s assets from the outside world. Now, there is no “inside” versus “outside”; everything is considered outside. A larger attack surface—the number of exposed and potentially vulnerable resources within your enterprise—means more opportunities for cybercriminals. And the average cost of a data breach in the U.S.? A staggering $9.44 million. Forward-looking organizations have implemented defense-in-depth (DiD), a multi-layered cybersecurity approach with several defensive mechanisms set up to protect valuable data and information. Others are implementing zero-trust, which basically means check, check again, then trust in order to verify.

One of a modern organization’s biggest challenges is assessing exactly how many entities they must secure. Keep in mind that microservices and modern applications have exponentially more pieces than previous generations of applications. One microservice may contain 10 pieces while a previous application had only one. Once you break down these multi-part applications and services, you must factor in how all these pieces communicate over the network—a network that should be inherently untrusted.

M.R.: Service mesh has long been thought of more as a DevOps solution, but can it too help with modern security?

Idit: Service mesh tackles the prime challenges of developing and securing microservices and modern applications (different teams using different languages and frameworks) by moving authentication and authorization to a common infrastructure layer. The service mesh helps authenticate between services to ensure secure traffic flow, also enforcing service-to-service and end-user-to-service authorization. Service mesh enforces role-based access control (RBAC) and attribute-based access control (ABAC). A service mesh can validate the identity of a microservice as well as the resource (server) running the microservice.

A service mesh also acts as traffic control within the network, freeing application teams to focus on building applications that benefit the business—without taking on the additional task of securing these applications. The service mesh delivers consistent security policies for inside and outside traffic and flexible authentication of users and machines. It also enables cryptographically trusted authentication for both users (humans) and machines or applications. Cryptographic security depends on keys to encrypt and decrypt data to verify and validate users. In addition to enabling encrypted paths between applications, service mesh allows for flexible failover (and improved uptime) and known points for security logging and monitoring.

M.R.: Does zero trust have a play here? How should InfoSec treat a zero trust strategy?

Idit: It’s been a year since president Joe Biden issued a cybersecurity executive order spelling out the importance of adopting a zero-trust cybersecurity approach, yet only 21% of critical infrastructure organizations have adopted a zero-trust model.

The zero-trust approach is essential for fast-moving, cloud-native application environments. Many commercial organizations and government agencies are turning to service mesh to bolster their zero-trust initiatives. Government agencies, for example, always struggle to secure high-value assets (including critical infrastructure) from hackers and bad actors. And these attackers can be internal (disgruntled employees or contractor/vendor breaches) or external (foreign nation-state threat actors). As a result, there are no insiders or outsiders; everyone is outside and untrusted until proven otherwise.

Service mesh is one of the simplest ways to enable zero-trust security. A service mesh helps authenticate and cryptographically validate and authorize people, devices and personas. It can further be used to enforce policies and identify potential threats.

M.R. is the Co-Founder of Sandhill.com

Today the customer support experience is critical to revenue at every phase of the customer journey, from pre-sales through renewal and expanding customer relationships. Krishna Raj Raja founded SupportLogic in 2016 to help transform the role of customer support, bringing deep experience in the service and support industry. 

As the first hire for VMware India, Krishna built the company’s support organization into a multi-thousand headcount global organization. Now at the helm of SupportLogic, he and the company help some of the largest B2B technology companies in the world to optimize their support experience.

M.R. Rangaswami: What are some of the trends driving the need for companies to focus on their support experience?

Krishna Raj Raja: There are several key trends that are accelerating the need for every company to invest in the customer support experience:

1. Velocity of technology adoption. It took 80 years for the invention of the telephone to reach 100 million users. Mobile phones took only 16 years and Whatsapp took less than four years. ChatGPT took only two months to reach that milestone. Not only is the rate of adoption faster, but we are also updating the technology at an increasingly faster rate. Both these trends stress vendors as it’s far more challenging to handle growing support issues without compromising the brand experience.
   
2. Focus has shifted to post-land. The rise of the “subscription economy” and SaaS put the spotlight on customer retention. Today more and more companies are transitioning to usage-based-monetization models. The focus has now shifted from landing customers to driving product adoption post-land. Support plays a crucial role in this transformation. Customers are more likely to adopt a product that is backed by a world-class support experience.
   
3. Product-led growth models for enterprise. This is part of a continued trend of “consumerization of the enterprise” which vendors may falsely assume means that it’s easy to design a perfect product that does not need marketing, sales and support to be successful. The opposite is true, in fact, and while some companies that are PLG-native may have an easier time, many companies who transition from traditional a sales-led GTM motion require even more investment in support experience to evolve successfully.
   
4. Big Data vs. Thick Data. Big Data’s focus historically has been on metadata and machine data. This is the first time in the industry we can process unstructured data at scale. The ability to process customer sentiment and unlock the Voice of the Customer from support interactions has led to the rise of thick data. Emerging business trends can now be spotted in thick data that were previously untapped in big data analysis.

M.R. Rangaswami: AI has jumped from being in the hype cycle to being a more mainstream technology. What role does it play in support experience?

Krishna Raj Raja:  ChatGPT has recently gained much media attention and AI technologies in general have accelerated greatly to serve more real-world applications including Support Experience. Companies are using AI and Natural Language Processing (NLP) to mine and organize raw customer sentiment signals like “frustration,” “needs attention,” “looking at alternative solutions” and turn it into predictive scores such as “likely to escalate or churn” and guided workflow steps for support managers and agents to  coach, assign cases to the right agent and feed a more intelligent product feedback loop.

The use of AI enables new levels of speed and precision to take the right steps to improve the customer experience at a scale of millions of customer interactions. 

M.R.: How do companies make the business case for solutions like SupportLogic during an economic downturn, where all costs are significantly scrutinized?

Krishna: In light of the current economic headwinds, every purchase is under a microscope and the business case must be rock solid. A few factors that are helping to move technology purchases forward:

1. An ability to consolidate and reduce other technology spend – i.e. a typical company may be spending money on hundreds or thousands of SaaS applications that get marginal use. If you can demonstrate that you perform the bulk of use cases and the same value as a bunch of them, it’s an easier internal sell to finance leadership.
   
2. Showing clear financial metrics and speaking the language of finance – e.g. calculations on how you help with Net-Dollar Retention, Margins, Customer Lifetime Value and the “Rule of 40” go a long way in getting support from finance and business decision makers.
   
3. Demonstrating benefits across multiple functions/departments in the organization vs. being narrowly focused on one role or function.

The good news is that investing in Support Experience with solutions like SupportLogic addresses all of these areas, making it a top investment priority for organizations that may be cutting back in other areas. We have content that walks through how to make the business case in more detail. 

M.R. Rangaswami is the Co-Founder of Sandhill.com

With over two decades of experience advising on tech strategy, M&A integration and operations improvement, Shub Bhowmick’s career has thrived with building and running high impact projects in a wide range of industries.

According to Forbes, Shub’s expertise favours his ability to breakdown complex problems, identify risks, assess business value and then provide recommendations on remediation/value attainment. All of which stemmed from his MBA at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, and a Bachelor of Technology with honors in Chemical Engineering from IIT-BHU in India.

M.R.Rangaswami: Everyone’s betting on analytics and AI, how should a company evaluate an AI vendor?

Shub Bhowmick: At a recent event, Reid Hoffman said, “You are sacrificing the future if you opt-out of AI completely.” The AI and data science industry continues to evolve at light speed, and this year will be no different. However, enterprises are adjusting their expectations as cost reduction and shareholder value realization are fast becoming a central theme.

In light of the increasing importance of AI in business today, companies worldwide are justifiably spending more time and effort evaluating AI consultants. Data science solutions are more valued than ever before because they help companies differentiate themselves from the competition and spark organic growth.

Identifying the right AI partner or solution can be challenging since everyone claims to be able to solve every problem, every time. First, it is important to know what problems your business is trying to solve; don’t go into this evaluation blindly—ensure that you have a clear list of what you need and what business goals you’re aiming to accomplish. Then, you need to take a closer look at your options: What problems are the various AI vendors solving (and how effective is their work)? What industries do they have experience with? Are they growing and innovating or standing still? Do they have a regional or global presence? Can they support a broad range of users?

Ultimately, doing things at the edge is what the future is about. A combinatorial focus on innovation, customer-centricity, business value realization and custom solutions will help you find the best AI vendor for your organization.

M.R.: What are the most effective ways for companies to use AI and ML to reduce costs and maximize profitability?

Shub: AI and machine learning technology have quickly become integral parts of digital transformation strategies for businesses, as these solutions are essential for improved efficiency, cost-cutting and maximizing profits. AI has the potential to integrate everything within an enterprise from customer insights to hyper-personalization, order generation, warehouse inventory optimization, the right routing optimization, delivery, products shown on the catalog, POS data and finally to pricing. To illustrate their immense capability and potential further, let’s look at some real-world use cases. 

For instance, a customer intelligence platform like COSMOS helps retailers get 360-degree visibility into the customer, both when they are with you and with the competition. The platform delivers real-time access to customer insights with seamlessly integrated first- and third-party data to run multiple experiments and perform holistic measurements.

Similarly, the role of AI in CPG and manufacturing is significant, where a solution like supply chain control tower future-proofs supply chain with prescriptive insights and helps companies handle future disruptions and opportunities, with centralized control. 

When used in collaboration, AI and ML can predict what products and services will be in greater demand so that businesses can maximize sales and growth opportunities while engaging fewer resources. AI and ML are designed to help companies decrease costs while growing profitability. This is just one of the many reasons more businesses are turning to the latest data science solutions.

M.R.: What is the last-mile problem in AI and how can it be solved?

Shub: The last-mile problem in AI is the critical gap between insight creation and value realization—it has long been one of the most challenging issues for organizations across various industries and continues to test companies today. While generating insights is certainly worthwhile, if you can’t use them to change behavior or move the dial, then that gap is both costly and unproductive for companies. 

Tredence ensures insights are actionable and impactful so our clients can grow revenue, remove barriers to innovation and uncover new opportunities to create meaningful and sustainable value. Working with several Fortune 100 CDOs, we help enterprises understand the economic value of data and the importance of leading a data-driven organization. With all that in mind, our goal is to be on every CDO’s speed dial in the next 2-3 years. We excel at solving the last-mile problem and helping organizations create true value; with Tredence, you can solve vertical and horizontal issues.

M.R. Rangaswami is the Co-Founder of Sandhill.com

Josh Lee is the Co-Founder and CEO of Swit, a Project Work Management platform. Selected as the winner of Startup Grind Global Conference 2020 among more than 4,000 applications and ranked No. 1 project management software in the Usability index among 140 competitions at G2 marketplace in 2022.

Recognized by CIO Review as Top 4 Remote Work Tech Solution together with Slack, Asana, and Monday in 2020 and officially recommended by the Google Workspace marketplace as Editor’s choice in 2021.

M.R. : Why is collaboration space saturated and how does Swit differentiate its offering?

Josh : Every team has different workflows and their own preferences for tooling. So each department even in the same organization can choose different tools that belong to the same software category. For example, IT teams want Jira for project work management while non-IT teams like HR, Marketing, or Sales prefer Asana or Monday separately for the same purpose.

This freedom of choosing tools ended up creating departmental boundaries, making it hard for multiple teams to collaborate for shared goals in a project. The more projects anyone gets involved with, the more silos they will suffer from, juggling through too many point solutions while losing context. Under this fragmented work environment, checking task dependencies with other teams in multiple projects feels unattainable. Companies are struggling against disconnected systems. We’re now in a crisis of tool overload. Streamlining workflows across teams is impossible without stitching these disconnected systems back.

So, we built Swit to provide a collaboration framework for cross-team projects by offering just the right amount of every common denominator of collaboration essentials from chat to task in one place. It’s designed for Employee Connection across departments so we can create a more connected employee experience in company-wide, cross-functional projects.

M.R.: How have strategies for digital transformation changed before and after the pandemic?

Josh : Throughout the pandemic, it’s become much harder to connect as teams. People are feeling more disconnected from each other, working in different places in different time zones. There are too many digital tools, and a notification-based chat only has failed to serve as a hub for 3rd party apps integration without distractions. Digital fatigue is now at an all-time high, leading directly to distrust, disengagement, inefficiency, and low productivity. Work synchronization should not depend too much on video call-based sync meetings. There’s just no question that we are digitally drained. In addition, new generations are looking for a unified work hub that enables asynchronous communication with efficiency and trackable collaboration with transparency to bring a more human, remote sense of belonging.

The world is changing and all previous Digital Transformation strategies will not work in this new world. We need a digital twin for the company completely redesigned from the ground up as a true-to-life space that connects our work across systems and brings people back closer together. 

Companies will not succeed in digital & cultural transformation by focusing on employee management but companies will succeed only by focusing on employee connection. Standing still in the comfort zone built pre-pandemic is not an option to survive and, needless to say, to thrive. Swit was born to connect people and work across departments and systems so that even large organizations can drive that connection beyond barriers and evolve their employee experience strategy more sustainably.

M.R.: How do you adjust Swit’s GTM strategy during this economic downturn?

Josh : We truly understand one good product is not good enough for scalability because one size does NOT fit all. This market is already hugely saturated with too many single-function point solutions. So we offer SaaS Integration Platform together so our clients can configure and customize the product to their needs, create user-defined bots, build and publish 3rd party app integrations, and automate all the necessary functions all by themselves. 

Salesforce said, the Future of SaaS is SIP, and we’ve just brought the Future to Now. This configurable product and customizable platform offering has been optimized to help our users better be able to stay connected across teams and across tools. Internally, we call this PPLG – Product & Platform-Led Growth. We built the “product” to be industry-neutral with common denominators of every team’s daily workflows while the “platform” empowers our clients to meet their industry-specific needs by themselves.

Fortunately, Swit is recession-proof because it’s an essential software that companies use consistently regardless of market fluctuations. Rather, Collaborative Work Management is the fastest growing category during the endemic.

Even though we’ve been offering one work hub that consolidates chat and tasks in one place for 4 years since launch, we’ll also release single-function tiers in July, 2023 with much more affordable pricing plans, add 11 languages and their local currencies to target global markets.

M.R. is the Co-Founder of Sandhill.com

Saket Modi is the Co-founder and CEO of Safe Security, a Cyber Risk Quantification and Management (CRQM) Platform company. A computer science engineer by education, he founded Safe Security in 2012 while in his final year of engineering, along with Rahul Tyagi and Vidit Baxi. Saket enjoys trying global cuisines, photography, and surprising his friends by playing the grand piano.

M.R. Rangaswami: What is it really like to work with John Chambers (an investor in your company) – what is the single most valuable advice he has given you?

Saket Modi: It’s incredible to work with John. He’s someone who has seen the economy and businesses move and reshuffle not once but multiple times. The most valuable advice he’s given us at Safe is to focus on customers. It reflects in our core value of keeping the customer first, always.

M.R.: What trends do you see in the Cyber insurance market: Who is buying, what about rates – say something the readers can take action on?

Saket: In Safe’s 2023 Cyber Insurance market outlook, we observe a trend wherein premium rates stabilize. Insurance carriers are adapting to new ways of underwriting cyber risks with an evolving threat landscape compounded with improved cybersecurity practices and investment with end-insureds.

Carriers have raised the bar for entry for cyber insurance, increasing the information security requirements for organizations to qualify to obtain coverage. Coming out of a hard market, we are now seeing more competition, with more carriers open to underwriting cyber insurance again.

2023 is the year the cyber insurance industry will introduce “inside-out” underwriting. They will leverage continuous, real-time, and precise cyber risk insights to effectively link the cyber insurance policy with the insured’s cybersecurity posture. With two-plus years of significant premium increases amidst reductions in coverage, insureds who have been investing in cyber security want to be acknowledged and rewarded by their cyber insurance partners and are more willing than ever to share “inside-out” cyber risk telemetry in a non-intrusive way.

M.R.: What are the top cyber risks you see in your customer base that are simple to mitigate for enterprises – with the highest ROI?

Saket: I don’t think we know a simple answer here. While customers are worried about ransomware and data breach the most, they increasingly want to model different possible risk scenarios dynamically. It is no longer about which risk is the most probable hypothetically.

Customers want to understand the reality of their cyber risk posture and act accordingly. Organizations we have interacted with understand that risk is subjective – varying with the industry, geography, and annual revenue. Security and risk leaders want to understand how their company is positioned in the present and compare their cybersecurity status with future cyber risk scenarios. That’s where Cyber Risk Quantification and Management (CRQM) solutions, such as the Safe Platform, help them.

SAFE allows them to build custom risk scenarios in their environment – enabling them to demonstrate and measure the likelihood of their organization being breached, the financial impact of possible breach scenarios, and a prioritized list of actions to improve security posture and reduce risk in a manner that maximized returns on security investment (ROSI).

M.R. Rangaswami is the Co-Founder of Sandhill.com

Prior to founding PingCAP, Max Liu was a software engineer for more than 15 years. He spent many hours designing and trying to fix database scaling issues to make coding faster, including creating Codis open-source project as the distributed cache solution.

Having first-hand experience with the time-consuming and repetitive processes engineers and developers face, Max developed TiDB, an open-source distributed database. TiDB offers a more streamlined database that can handle scalability and petabytes of data so customers can focus on more important areas like data analysis and business development.

M.R. Rangaswami: What is HTAP and why is it important to the enterprise?

Max Liu: Hybrid Transactional and Analytical Processing (HTAP) is a type of database that is able to process both Online Transactional and Analytical Processing workloads within the same system, sharing the single source of truth without data link delay in between. This allows for the simplification of technology stacks and data silos, which helps companies to build actionable data insight right from the real-time update and be able to drive for faster growth.  HTAP is important to the enterprise because it allows for more efficient and streamlined data processing, which can improve cost efficiency, and expedite business operations and decision making.

M.R.: What are the biggest challenges for database and analytics management today and how should they be addressed?

Max: The biggest challenges for database and analytics management today can be summarized  in three Vs: volume, variety, and velocity. The need to process a growing volume and variety of data, the need for real-time data processing and analysis, and the need to integrate data from multiple sources and systems. These challenges can be addressed through the use of advanced technologies such as in-memory databases, distributed databases, and cloud-based analytics platforms, respectively. In order to satisfy all three needs, a very complex data architecture has become a new norm.

As the side effect, the challenge extends further into balancing between data capability and evolving velocity. Additionally, the lack of data engineering talent for such a complex architecture is a high barrier for most organizations to adopt a data-driven culture, investing in skilled personnel, and implementing effective data governance and security practices.

M.R.: Where do you see the database market evolving in the next 5 years?

Max: In the next 5 years, I expect the database market to continue to grow and evolve, with a focus on cloud-based solutions, the integration of artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies, and the development of distributed and scalable databases to support the growing volume and complexity of data. Simplified data architecture is likely to play a key role in this evolution, as it can help to reduce complexity and improve data accessibility, enabling organizations to gain greater insights from their data and make more informed business decisions.

Additionally, there may be increased emphasis on data security and privacy, as well as the integration of databases with other technologies, which can be beneficial from the single database architecture again. Overall, I expect the database market to grow even faster with recent AI technology boosts, like OpenAI 3.5 or even the coming OpenAI 4. And the beauty of simplicity, for instance HTAP databases and low/no code tools, will become more powerful.

M.R. Rangaswami is the Co-Founder of Sandhill.com

Peter Brereton is president and CEO of Tecsys, a global supply chain management software company. He joined Tecsys at its inception and initially led the company’s software development, product management, sales and marketing, and has been now serving as president and CEO for over 20 years.

Having been recognised with an EY Entrepreneur Of The Year® award in Quebec in 2019, Peter leads with a strong moral compass rooted in family and faith. He has guided the company
through tremendous growth, not only with a sharp vision for the supply chain industry, but by
adhering to his fundamental values of authenticity and honesty.

With 20+ years at Tecsys, Peter has a lot to share about growth, leadership and the future of tech in the healthcare space.

M.R. Rangaswami: Let’s break down the functions of “Who” Tecsys is, and what do you do?

Peter Brerenton: Coming up on our 40th anniversary, Tecsys sells and implements SaaS ERP
and WMS solutions that manage agile supply chains. We’re currently at about a $150M run
rate, with SaaS revenues growing at about 40% per year, and we’re profitable!
Tecsys’ end-to-end supply chain software platform includes solutions for warehouse
management, distribution and transportation management, supply management at point of
use, order management and fulfillment, as well as financial management and analytics
solutions.

These solutions are designed to accommodate the needs of several industry
segments; our customers include organisations spanning third-party and complex distribution,
converging retail, healthcare supply chain, as well as government bodies and agencies.

For decades, organisations have been adding length and complexity to their supply chains
without paying attention to the vulnerabilities that those complexities create. Layer in digital
commerce, globalisation, new consumer expectations and aging systems, and what worked in
the past is likely less relevant now. In today’s rapidly changing world, an agile supply chain
platform that can efficiently manage change is crucial to remaining competitive.

That’s where we deliver our greatest value. Through our software solutions, we empower companies to run a modern supply chain practice with end-to-end visibility and the digital tools to adapt to change.

M.R.: I hear that Tecsys solutions are truly transforming some aspects of healthcare. Can you
explain?

Peter: Over the last 10 years, Tecsys has proven that an efficient real-time digital supply chain
platform improves cost, quality and outcome for hospital networks. Tecsys is the established
leader in this market with more than 50 substantial hospital networks on their platform. We are
currently adding an additional two or three per quarter.

Tecsys championed a concept to manage a health system’s supplies following an industry best
practice framework; it came to be known as the consolidated service center and is widely
considered the benchmark for strategic supply chain management at a health system level.
With dozens of major health system implementations under our belt, we continue to lead the
industry in transforming traditional healthcare supply chain operations into modern clinically
integrated supply chain networks.

Another important facet of healthcare supply chain management is to facilitate collaboration between clinical and logistics teams to provide the best possible outcomes for patients. Because this is such an important part of the care delivery chain, we are highly focused on the
deployment of clinically integrated point of use technology that connects clinical operations to
the back-office supply chain activities needed to support patient care.

At this point, we are the only vendor in the market that can tie the or, cath lab, general
supplies and pharmacy together in a truly integrated supply chain along with the off-campus
warehouse or consolidated service center. It turns out that having the right product at the right
time for the right patient and in the hands of the right clinician saves lives and millions of
dollars!

M.R.: What do the next three years look like for Tecsys in the healthcare space?

Peter: The healthcare industry is under pressure from both a clinical and operational
perspective. With labor challenges and rising supply costs continuing to squeeze margin, this
sector is facing a formidable challenge. The pandemic deepened and accelerated those
challenges, exposing vulnerabilities and forcing transformation on healthcare organisations that
were slower to adapt.

Supply chain transparency and traceability will continue to drive investment in the healthcare
sector. Health systems will keep evolving and growing, which means higher supply chain
complexity, and increased challenges.

The behemoth enterprise systems that worked well at the turn of the millennium are really
showing their limitations now, and the urgency to modernise is just ramping up. There are 550 hospital networks in the U.S. and Tecsys is pursuing the top 300. Tecsys fully expects to have
over 100 hospital networks as clients within the next three years on our way to more than 50%
market share.

M.R. Rangaswami is the Co-Founder of Sandhill.com

There’s a new age of B2B Growth and it’s all about the product experience and CEO of Threekit Visual, Matt Gorniak, is at the forefront of this era.

Matt’s expertise comes from co-founding G2, cloud pioneers such as BigMachines (acquired by Oracle), SteelBrick (acquired by Salesforce and now Salesforce CPQ) and now, Threekit Visual. 

Here is what Matt and his teams are seeing as they usher in a new age of B2B growth. 

M.R. Rangaswami: Why is it the new age of B2B Growth?

Matt Gorniak: The best way to view the world of B2B Commerce is in 3 stages.

First, it was a world of spreadsheets and lots of manual processes. 

Second, where most B2B companies are today – a world built around making it easier for the seller to sell. Tools like CRM, CPQ, ERP etc. make sales processes faster and more efficient for the seller. 

Third is the new age of B2B where new kings will be crowned. Today it’s not about just making it easier for sellers to sell. What’s changed is that now it’s about making it easy for buyers to buy. 

B2B winners will make it easy for customers to buy on their terms. They will show more or their product and deliver amazing, seamless, and efficient product experiences that keep their customers coming back. 

M.R.: You mention moving from the age of “Seller to Buyer” – why is that important?

Matt: It has been said but it bears repeating: everyone – and I mean everyone – wants to have an easier buying experience. B2B buyers really do want self-service as much as possible whether buying bulk gift cards or a forklift. 

To complete a sale today most B2B companies need a salesperson to collect criteria, create a quote, send samples, do renderings and more.

To compete and win in the future B2B companies will have a tool that allows buyers to configure, price, and visualize a product in real time.

Buyers want to be able to literally see the product, be able to configure it, and get served up all the relevant pricing, quoting, delivery information. And they want it easily accessible, 24/7; with all of the product and customer rules baked in. 

M.R.: How Does Threekit Visual Commerce help B2B brands level up to the new age of B2B Growth?

Matt: Threekit creates a magical product experience for you buyers. Let buyers visually configure your product with a platform fully integrated with your tech stack 

It works by taking your product catalog and rules and mapping that onto 3D assets. The platform delivers visual configuration in 3D, 2D, and AR so that customers can configure, build, and buy 24/7. 

Threekit integrates with all of your systems like CPQ, eCommerce, and ERP – so buyers get an accurate price, delivery estimate, and other key information in real time. You can also syndicate the experience to distributors and resellers so they can sell more on your behalf.

The future of B2B is different – it’s about the buyer. The new age of B2B winners will be the manufacturers that create a product experience which gives the buyer an accurate visual configuration along with all of the necessary information to buy now. 

M.R. Rangaswami is the Co-Founder of Sandhill.com

Happy New Year!

Nick Cromydas is the Co-Founder and CEO of Hunt Club, a tech-enabled talent and recruitment company placing leadership roles across the fastest-growing companies in the tech sector. 

Based in Chicago, Hunt Club has helped over 1,000 high-growth companies land incredible leaders, helping many of them scale their business from seed funding to unicorn status in a matter of years. By leveraging its technology, talent network, and the power of referrals, Hunt Club helps companies find their next great leader faster.   

Prior to Hunt Club, Nick founded New Coast Ventures, a Venture studio that started or invested in over 50+ early-stage startups (4 unicorns) with material exits to companies like goPuff, Compass, and more.  

M.R. Rangaswami: Is now the right time to hire, given multiple retractions in the SaaS and tech space? 

Nick Cromydas: The short answer is, yes. 

Historically, downturns are a great time to a) build a business and b) slow down to re-evaluate your business & focus on getting product-market fit right. We are seeing this shift through the hires companies are pursuing now, versus roles they focused on in previous years, where growth for growth’s sake was driving much of the market. 

It’s really a tale of two cities. The media continues to share news around reductions, creating fear in the marketplace, but our team is on the ground helping as tech companies continue to hire. For the most part, growth-stage businesses have plenty of cash. 

While the period of hypergrowth and high valuations has cooled off, over $643 billion in global venture investment was deployed in 2021, meaning startups are equipped with cash in their reserves. Founders are just being much more thoughtful in how they deploy those dollars. 

Looking ahead, $290 billion in venture “dry powder” dollars are sitting on the sidelines with $162 billion earmarked for new investments in 2023. Analysts predict that this capital will be deployed next year, reinvigorating tech and startup capital, thus boosting hiring volume needs in the new year. 

My sense is, as inflation eases and investors start to gain confidence again, we should see a surge in hiring across the tech sector in H1 and H2 of 2023. They might not hire at the same velocity we saw in 2021, largely due to the fact that capital markets won’t be as liquid, but strong balance sheets in Q1 and Q2 2022 are helping to sustain normalcy.

MR.: What are the top talent trends you’re seeing right now? 

Nick: Companies want to hire, strategically. 

The volume of businesses with intent to hire has not gone down, they are just being much more thoughtful and intentional about spinning up new roles or growing teams too fast. They are also reprioritizing where to deploy dollars, focussing on roles like engineering, product and operations. 

In 2021 and the first half of 2022, the scales were flipped. It was a candidate market and employers had to fight and open extra roles to build benches. With the Great Resignation followed by Quiet-Quitting, it was an all-out talent war to secure top talent. That combination created a deep deficit in top talent over the past two years – with many key roles left unfilled. Now, with the unfortunate workforce reduction taking place across industries, there is an opportunity for that talent to be absorbed back into the workforce, quickly. As a result we are having very strategic conversations with our customers about what positions they need to fill now versus where they can hold off to get by to maximize budgets. 

This is particularly true in the tech sector, where unemployment most recently fell from 2.2% to 2% in November. There is a healthy tension between the number of open roles and the caliber of talent needed to fill those roles. 

The hybrid work model has also driven the need for dramatic innovation, stumping many founders on how to transform themselves to keep up with changed behavior in a digital-first workforce. This means both search and internal talent acquisition needs to change and there has been very little innovation in the space that has achieved scale since LinkedIn. Without a playbook on how to build the best teams, Hunt Club has helped growth stage companies navigate through these changes, offering an effective way for them to reach top talent regardless of their own network or geography.   

Another interesting point is that compensation levels have not materially changed due to layoffs and current market dynamics, and they do not show signs of coming down to pre-pandemic levels. In some cases, the salaries are higher than ever. In others, they seem to be on par since 2021. Geographically, the top 4 markets (SF/ Bay Area, NYC, LA, and Boston) have driven 68% of VC investments so far in 2022. These markets continue to hire across state lines due to remote work flexibility since the pandemic. 

Demographic changes to the overall workforce are also causing a ripple effect. Aging baby boomers are increasingly retiring from legacy c-level role positions. At the same time, a supply deficit of digital-first talent is making it harder for companies to reach and secure the right people to lead. Companies can’t afford to get these hires wrong, making the need for innovation and accuracy critical to how they approach talent acquisition. 

MR.: How are the best leaders handling a looming recession?  

Nick: As we’ve scaled Hunt Club over the years, I’ve had the advantage of partnering and learning from top CEOs and investors who are building the companies of tomorrow, while dealing with the challenges of today. The leaders who can tactfully navigate the stages of discomfort and doubt, while staying focused on what’s most important – without creating unnecessary panic, end up on top.

When we encounter a downcycle, we’re all looking for ways to reduce spending, while trying to keep the focus on growing product market fit – a juxtaposition that can feel daunting. Talent is not one of the areas where good leaders skimp out. In order to withstand recession volatility, the smartest companies are focused on making sure they have strong leadership in place to help guide and weather them through the storm.

We are indeed seeing some slowdown across B2C and other sectors, but there are also pockets taking a counterintuitive approach to the macro-market, where hiring is still a top priority. For instance, leadership talent is top of mind for many growth-stage companies and we haven’t seen a drop in those roles. Savvy, forward-thinking founders are actively looking for experienced leaders who have managed through turbulent markets to help sustain and optimize operations. Going back to where we started, early-stage companies recognize that the best time to build a business is often in a downturn. A boomerang market is an opportune time to build foundational teams to drive future growth and scale.  

M.R. Rangaswami is the Co-Founder of Sandhill.com

Affectionately as “Bunny,” Warren Weiss has had decades of success uncovering tech giants in their emerging stages. His work on SilverSpring Networks earned him a spot on the Forbes Midas List of Technology’s Top Investors. He’s a four-time CEO of venture backed companies, and worked with Steve Jobs at NeXT.

Bunny serves on the Board of Binarly for WestWave Capital. He remains a General Partner on past fundsat Foundation Capital (where he no longer makes new investments) and serves on the boards of ForgeRock (IPO) and Visier. Bunny is also on the board of the Weiss Scholarship Foundation, a charity that provides education to children in Kenya.

With Warren’s experience and perspective, we figured this would be a quick and insightful read as we head into the new year.

M.R. RangaswamiI: What is your take on investing in early stage companies during a recession?

Warren Weiss: Its very important to have two years cash runway to give early stage companies the time to build a great product and get paying customers. We hear a lot about product lead growth however this usually takes longer than most startups plan for.

There is historical precendence that you can build some of the best companies during a market recession. As a venture investor I have learned you can’t time the market so if you continue to invest
in the very best companies in a down market there is a good chance you will have good outcomes for your investors.

Customers only buy in a recession when it’s one of their top priorities to either cut cost or drive revenue which is one of the main reasons only the strong companies survive.

M.R. How much should early stage companies try to grow their business vs burning cash in a recession?

Warren: Each new series of fund raising comes with milestones around ARR, SaaS metics, product
market fit, sales motion etc. You have to understand as a startup company what these
milestones are and have a plan that gives you enough time to achieve these goals.

In a recession market you won’t raise money from good investors if you don’t build a plan that
shows 100 percent growth in the first couple of years. You should try to keep you monthly net
cash burn in the $300k to $400k range during those first few years. No cash no company!!!

M.R.: What areas of early stage investing are still drawing strong customer demand in the Enterprise market?

Warren: This is likely to evolve the longer this recession last. In the Enterprise venture early stage market we still see strong momentum in security, cloud infrastructure, analytics and Web3.

M.R. Rangaswami is the Co-Founder of Sandhill.com

Kubernetes usage is experiencing record growth—96% of organizations are using or evaluating Kubernetes. However, modern enterprises are challenged with having to use a disparate number of applications to run Kubernetes projects. 

Haseeb Budhani is the CEO of Rafay Systems, which he co-founded in October of 2017. Previously spending just as much time wrestling with Kubernetes ops as they did developing the software product they were selling. Haseeb knew there had to be a better way to manage the operations for their modern infrastructure, Haseeb and Hemanth (his Co-Founder) built their own and founded Rafay Systems.

Rafay’s cloud-native Kubernetes Operations Platform is the industry’s first and only product purpose-built for platform teams that addresses the complexity of K8s, delivering the automation developers and operations want with the right level of standardization, control and governance. 

This is what Haseeb’s expertise offers us:

M.R. Rangaswami: Kubernetes has become incredibly popular since its inception. Can you please explain why it gained popularity so quickly, why you founded Rafay and what problem(s) Rafay’s approach to Kubernetes operations and management solves for modern enterprises?

Haseeb Budhani: According to Gartner, enterprises adopt Kubernetes to manage modern applications in the cloud because it automates application deployment and scalability, bolsters application stability and works across public and private clouds, among other benefits. The problem is that Kubernetes has a steep learning curve and is complicated to manage at enterprise scale. My colleagues and I started Rafay because we had previously experienced the negative impact of suboptimal infrastructure automation. We witnessed multiple first-gen companies that were founded to help developers provision Kubernetes clusters for container orchestration, but found that they did little to eliminate the complexities of Kubernetes or to provide governance-focused features to ensure clusters are enterprise-ready. 

In working with Rafay’s customers, we have affirmed our foundational hypothesis around how a majority of enterprises are keen to speed up their application modernization journeys, but run into the same set of Kubernetes roadblocks. As a result, many of these enterprises begin a long and costly journey of stitching together a variety of off-the-shelf or OSS tools, along with hiring more resources over time to make Kubernetes work. However, the sheer complexity of enterprise-grade requirements and a shortage of engineers with deep Kubernetes experience makes this a doomed endeavor. 

At Rafay we address these challenges with our Kubernetes Operations Platform (KOP). Our vision is to deliver a broad platform that enables IT to automate and control every aspect of Kubernetes operations for enterprise and service providers. Similar to how VMware’s vCenter enables the management and operations of virtual machines across multiple VMware hosts, enterprises need a vCenter-like experience for their Kubernetes cluster fleets: an automation and governance framework that IT teams can leverage to deploy and manage Kubernetes across on-premises and cloud environments. Rafay’s core offering is the industry’s first and only platform that brings together all the capabilities enterprises need to turn Kubernetes from a roadblock to an enabler, including multi-cluster management, security, network and application visibility, configuration management, cost management and more. With Rafay, enterprise platform teams can centralize and standardize the use and management of Kubernetes across the company. Our SaaS-first approach enables enterprises to be operational within days – not months – thus helping to accelerate their digital transformation initiatives, while keeping operating costs low.

M.R.: Platform teams are quickly rising as the quarterbacks of innovation for companies. What does this proliferation mean for the future of Kubernetes management?

Haseeb: The pace of innovation in cloud technologies is nothing less than astronomical. This pace exerts pressure on enterprise teams to keep up with changing automation frameworks, integrations and the multitude of tools and supporting services required for the enterprise’s cloud journey to be successful. It ends in many enterprises struggling to stay on track with their application delivery roadmap and timelines. To reduce this complexity and ultimately streamline the deployment and management of Kubernetes and modern applications, platform teams are being instituted to take the helm – no pun intended.

By providing a shared services platform for Kubernetes management and operations, platform teams abstract the operational complexity associated with Kubernetes, with the goal of empowering developers to consume Kubernetes and deploy modern applications in a self-service fashion. Enterprises then gain operational efficiencies by standardizing and automating all the tasks from code to cloud – that is, all the steps between code complete and deploying that completed application in the cloud.

M.R. How do you see the use of Kubernetes growing, and how should enterprises prepare
now in order to leverage it in the best way possible?

Haseeb: As businesses continue to leverage cloud technologies, Kubernetes adoption will radically increase to help companies manage their modern applications more easily. 96% of organizations are already using or evaluating Kubernetes – but these businesses are starting to experience the increasing costs and complexities associated with building Kubernetes management platforms in-house.

More and more, businesses will need to rely on off-the-shelf Kubernetes management offerings to help them manage the chaos. This growing reliance on Kubernetes management and operations solutions is clearly factored into the Kubernetes solutions market size, which is estimated to reach $5.5B+ by 2028.

Many companies attempt to build Kubernetes management platforms on their own. This exercise may seem easy at first as teams get Kubernetes up and running in the lab, but in a production environment, the problem set expands far beyond basic cluster provisioning capabilities.

The complexities of managing Kubernetes intensify as it is used by multiple teams to deploy a growing number of applications across public and private clouds. What’s more, the Kubernetes skills gap is a real issue – tapping into this talent pool is very competitive and, once beginners become experienced, many can take advantage of the open job market.Haseeb

To prepare for the wide-spread growth of Kubernetes, companies should seek experienced partners – ideally those who solve Kubernetes automation and governance requirements with a product-based approach – to guide them through their Kubernetes journey and avoid the pitfalls and wasted time many other companies have experienced. By doing so, enterprises can leapfrog their competition and gain the massive competitive advantage that faster innovation delivers.

M.R. Rangaswami is the Co-Founder of Sandhill.com

As the CEO of SlashNext, Patrick Harr directs a workforce of security professionals focused on protecting people and organizations from phishing anywhere.

Before joining SlashNext, Harr served as the CEO of Panzura. There, he transformed their company into a SaaS company, grew annual contract value by 400%, and led to a successful acquisition in 2020.

Previously, he held senior executive and GM positions at Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, VMware, BlueCoat and was CEO of multiple security and storage start-ups, including Nirvanix (acquired by Oracle), Preventsys (acquired by McAfee), and Sanera (acquired by McDATA).

In a world where hackers, and security threats are common considerations for businesses, this conversation was a helpful one to have.

M.R. Rangaswami: What are the core focus areas you see that help solve phishing attacks and other security threats for customers? 

Patrick Harr: Hackers are increasingly turning their attention to mobile devices with new tactics including non-linked based phishing, and SMS/text phishing, known as smishing. The latest Verizon MSI report showed that 83% of organizations report mobile device threats are growing more quickly than other device threats. 

Along those lines, we recently released the SlashNext State of Phishing Report for 2022, which analyzed billions of link-based URLs, attachments, and natural language messages in email, mobile and browser channels over six months. We found more than 255 million attacks, marking a 61% increase in the rate of phishing attacks compared to 2021. Also, SlashNext detected an 80% increase in threats from trusted services such as Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, or Google, with nearly one-third (32%) of all threats now being hosted on trusted services.

These findings show that legacy security strategies – including secure email gateways, firewalls, and proxy servers – are no longer stopping threats, especially as bad actors launch their attacks from trusted services and business and personal messaging apps.

SlashNext helps to protect the modern workforce from such malicious messages across all digital channels. SlashNext’s Integrated Cloud Messaging Security is built for email, browser, mobile, and brand to protect organizations from data theft and financial fraud breaches. The SlashNext Complete™ integrated cloud messaging security platform utilizes patented AI SEER™ technology with 99.9% accuracy to detect threats in real-time and prevent users from phishing, smishing, social engineering, ransomware, and malicious file downloads.

M.R.: What industry trends are having the greatest security impacts for the modern workforce today?

Patrick: Cybercriminals are increasingly moving their attacks to mobile and personal communication channels to reach employees. As a result, the single biggest threat to any company is no longer machine security – it is the human security factor due to the explosion of personal employee data in the newly hybrid workforce. These blind spots are becoming more apparent as organizations adopt new channels for personal messaging, communications, and collaboration.

In fact, SlashNext recorded a 50% increase in attacks on mobile devices this year, with scams and credential thefts at the top of the list for payloads. Such attacks on humans will continue to increase because humans are fallible and they get distracted, making it hard for people to easily identify many threats as being malicious.

It all comes down to the question of how do I validate that you really are the person I think I am communicating with? Or is this the trusted file or corporate website link that I assumed it was before clicking on it? This problem is growing because more people are working on the same device for their business tasks and their personal lives simultaneously. I only see this trend accelerating in the coming year.

M.R.: What are you working on to help close this mobile security gap?

Patrick: In October, we launched Mobile Security Personal and Home apps for BYOD and Family use to protect mobile device owners against the growing threat of phishing and fraud attempts on SMS/text, links, and apps. These apps provide total privacy for users’ data. 

The personal BYOD edition can be purchased by a business for employees, as either a managed app or unmanaged option for user data privacy for BYOD. The Home edition involves an annual subscription which covers up to five mobile devices that can be shared across family members, and not tied to any corporate business accounts.

SlashNext has the only on-device solution to block link-based and non-link-based SMS phishing attacks, which is the first stage of attack in a Business Text Compromise (BTC). As a result, SlashNext Mobile Security gives users another layer of security on their personal devices while helping businesses to protect their company data and maintain employee privacy.

M.R. Rangaswami is the Co-Founder of Sandhill.com

Edward Chiu is the CEO and Co-Founder of Catalyst, the market’s fastest growing Customer Success Platform (CSP) built by CS Leaders for CS teams. Through his leadership, Catalyst is helping enterprise companies drive revenue growth by giving them a clear line of sight into customer health and upsell opportunities. Previously, Edward built and led the Customer Success team at DigitalOcean, helping the company grow to $150M+ in revenue and one of the largest publicly traded cloud providers.

Catalyst has consistently been named a leader in multiple categories from LinkedIn’s Top 50 Startups, Crain’s Best Place to Work, Built-In Best Place to Work, and most recently Inc.’s Best In Business 2022.

M.R. Rangaswami: Why is Customer Success (CS) so important in this economy and how has it become the new revenue growth engine?

Edward Chiu: We’re experiencing one of the largest stock market drawdowns in the past couple of decades. Some of the best companies in the world you wouldn’t expect have done layoffs like Amazon and Salesforce. Back in the 07-09 recession, there was a study done by a consulting group that highlighted companies that focused on customer experience significantly outperformed the S&P 500, and those who didn’t saw their returns drop in free fall. 

Customer Success is important in this economy because it helps to ensure your existing customers, who are keeping your business afloat – are satisfied with the products and services they have purchased. This ultimately leads to the much-needed retention during a down market and most importantly, organic revenue growth. There’s nothing cheaper than generating repeat business and word-of-mouth growth through your existing champions. CS has become an increasingly important part of many companies’ growth strategies, as they also leverage it as a differentiating “product” from their competitors.

Having spoken to hundreds of Chief Customer/Revenue/Executive Officers in the past couple of months, the number 1 focus they are all shifting to is creating “growth through their existing customers”. Leaders are frantically trying to organize all of their customer data from disparate sources and find immediate opportunities where Customer Success and Sales can start to tackle jointly.

M.R.: Sounds like customer success is becoming the new growth, how do executives go about creating a program that truly scales this process?

Edward: Existing customers have ALWAYS been one of the most important growth drivers, but because of this market downturn, it’s now becoming the primary.

Most executives think this shift is incredibly daunting but it’s actually quite simple. To start, CS leaders have to be expeditiously focused on data-driven customer success. 

They need to first identify specific metrics and data points that are most relevant to their customers’ success. This may include data on feature adoption, level of engagement with company reps or content, successful outcome moments, etc. Next, they need to work with other stakeholders in the company to identify where this data is captured, generally, it’s in some kind of data warehouse like Snowflake or Redshift.

Most leaders tend to depend on data science teams or engineers to analyze this data using data visualization tools, but that creates a lot of dependency on other departments. That’s where Customer Success Platforms (CSPs) like Catalyst.io come in. CSPs are unique solutions that aggregate all of your data from Salesforce, data warehouse, ticketing software like Zendesk, and converge it into a single pane of glass. From there, you can quickly segment your customers by adoption and automatically send customized interactions to drive upsells that don’t rely on manual labor from your reps.

M.R.: What’s a trend you’re predicting in the next 6 months given the focus from new business acquisition to driving revenue growth from existing customers?

Edward: I was chatting with a Chief Financial Officer recently of a $100M+ software company and the most illuminating thing about our conversation was how important he viewed customer success as a revenue driver for their path to going public. Retention was an afterthought for him because churn isn’t a problem for their company, but effective collaboration between the go-to-market teams to generate targeted upsells is an area that requires deeper investments. Immediately following our call he introduced me to their Chief Customer Officer and VP of Product to learn more about data aggregation and improving their collaborative process to drive upsells.

In all my time in CS, it has been incredibly rare to see finance leaders be so invested in this topic, let alone be the first touch point in creating motions for change. The trend we are witnessing and will continue to see is customer success becoming the center for organizations. Product development will start with what your existing customers are looking for, marketing initiatives will revolve around the customers’ voice, and sales will partner closer than ever with CS to account for majority of the business revenue.

It’s an exciting time for businesses to focus on Customer Success, most importantly it will be the primary focus that leads businesses out of this economic downturn.

M.R. Rangaswami is the Co-Founder of Sandhill.com

Kashyap has a unique history of being a fourth-time entrepreneur, previously selling companies to OpenTable and Future Group. He is also a best-selling author and investor. Kashyap started his first company as a college student at IIT Bombay and sold it to a Silicon Valley firm.

In his current role, Kashyap is focused on driving technology that powers the gig economy and how the workforce is shifting to flex work (including field service, delivery, and rideshare drivers).

Our conversation with Kashyap was timely with the impact holidays have on tech in both traditional commerce and e-commerce.

M.R. Rangaswami: What are some of the technology innovations that will most impact the logistics market this upcoming holiday shopping season, and why should consumers care?

Kashyap Deorah: From what I am seeing, the bigger bottleneck to fulfillment is workforce supply rather than demand. Innovations that can help retailers and ecommerce companies find warehouse and delivery workforce will lead to high impact in terms of fulfilling consumer demand. This adds to the global supply chain woes and rising oil prices. In some ways, this is probably the first supply-driven recession, rather than a consumption or demand-driven recession.

More specifically, there are flex work marketplaces where retailers can post jobs, and these platforms match nearby workers with the right skills, and then manage the end-to-end experience from making sure they show up, to spending the right amount of time, charging for the right time and distance, and so on. Flex workers are being hired for warehouse, store, delivery and other jobs that facilitate last mile logistics. Technology innovations that accelerate this trend will directly impact online shopping this holiday season.

M.R.: Walk us through the past, present and future of gig work, and explain how logistics technology builders have evolved alongside. Also where do you predict the gig economy will go next? 

Kashyap: Gig work is quite an irony of our times. When the Department of Labor first came up with the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) in 1938, at the end of the Great Depression, President Franklin Roosevelt and team never imagined that one day there would be a class of businesses driven by workers who are working for themselves, yet integrally driving the entire business that they serve. Now, 2% of America’s GDP (half a trillion dollars) relies on the gig economy and is growing fast. Businesses, workers and the government are slowly but surely coming to terms with this reality.

With the Great Resignation, the gig economy is set to grow to an even higher portion of the GDP. The trend goes well beyond rideshares, food and grocery deliveries, and affects all industries that employ hourly, daily, weekly wage workers. The gig model brings meritocracy and the power of the Internet to a labor market that has been stuck in the archaic model of fixed hourly rate and time-and-a-half overtime paradigm since the 1930s. The post-WWII paradigm of employer-sponsored healthcare will also need to be revisited.

M.R.: You have mentioned that last mile logistics technology and operations require an overhaul – what does this overhaul entail and how will it affect both the gig workers whose job it is to supply last mile delivery and services, and the consumers who have come to expect “instant commerce”?

Kashyap: Logistics tech is long in the tooth. Commerce has focused on deploying technology to win more customers and orders on the front-end. It is a recent phenomenon that fulfillment (last mile logistics) has gone from being the back-end to the key value proposition, or the front-end. In other words, consumers put convenience ahead of product and price when they choose where to shop. Old logistics tech that was built for scheduled delivery by a rostered workforce is finding it hard to meet the moment. A few on-demand apps are gaining market share at the expense of the incumbents due to their modern logistics tech. The biggest overhaul in logistics technology would be to enable gig workers to fulfill on-demand and same-day deliveries with the help of live location and mapping tech. From route planning, to assignment, to seeing the order through to delivery, it all needs to be orchestrated in real-time.

M.R. Rangaswami is the Co-Founder of Sandhill.com

As CEO and Founder of BeyondView, Kul Wadhwa is revolutionizing the way commercial properties are marketed and managed. The company’s immersive, game-like experience is disrupting the commercial real estate landscape by accelerating the property leasing management process at a fraction of current costs. 

We talked with Kul about how digital twin tech will help property management and the enhancements we’ll be seeing more of in the commercial leasing space.

M.R.: What direction is real estate technology headed?

Kul Wadhwa: In an industry that is often considered immovable or at least slow to accepting change, technology will increasingly have an impact on real estate. More specifically, the future of real estate technology will involve digital twins. According to a recent report, the digital twin market is expected to reach $72.65 billion by the year 2032, a growth of over 22%. 

Utilizing artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning, real estate companies can digitize a space at a fraction of current costs, creating a live asset. The result is a building-specific database that is highly customizable, presenting easily accessible data that also allows for properties to be reimagined in no time at all. From my perspective as a technology-minded entrepreneur, this change is not only exciting but extremely necessary.

M.R.: How does digital twin technology assist with resource planning and property management? 

Kul: Data that is expected to guide the corporate decision-making process is often presented in a manner that is difficult to understand and additional digital and software solutions make the process even more bloated and complicated. By leveraging digital twin technology, decision makers can readily retrieve all relevant information about a building and its assets that is both intuitive and contextualized. This database presents a visualization of data that is easily accessible in real-time from a desktop or even a phone and is available for quick redeployment. Additionally, the information presented facilitates a streamlined decision-making process and eliminates any physical hurdles or constraints. 

M.R.: How does real estate technology change the leasing process now and into the future?

Kul: While real estate renderings and virtual walkthroughs of old have been disappointing and unrealistic, new technologies offer immersive, photorealistic, and gaming-like experiences that are proven to accelerate a space’s leasing cycle. 

It may sound futuristic that there are technologies that allow stakeholders to join virtual tours of digitally reimagined spaces that look and feel like you are physically present at a remote location. But these technologies exist today. Over time, platforms that offer imbedded communication tools that allow brokers, prospective tenants, and property managers to collaborate in real-time and demonstrate a space’s unmet potential will accelerate the leasing and even buildout process. Especially in downturn markets, technologies like these will prove to be essential. 

M.R. Rangaswami is the Co-Founder of Sandhill.com

While the median EV/Revenue multiple for 3Q22 was 6.3x, down 61% year-over-year the Software Equity Group’s Q3 Public Market Update finds the silver lining in this quarter’s update.

Even as public markets continue to experience volatility, valuations for public SaaS companies have effectively been flat month-over-month since May (hovering around 6.0x EV/Revenue).

Despite the broader market decline, the financial health of businesses in the SEG SaaS Index continues to remain strong in several areas:

• Companies continue to grow larger in scale. Total median revenue reached an impressive $602 million in Q3.
  
• Median revenue growth has maintained a steady pace in the mid-20% range. In 3Q22, the Index boasted a healthy TTM revenue growth rate of 26.4%, up from 24.9% in 3Q21.
  
• The Index’s 71.3% median gross profit margin remains strong and is generally consistent with prior quarters.
  

Here are three highlight updates from the 2022 Q3 Report.

I) Revenue Performance
Businesses in SEG’s SaaS Index grew larger in 3Q22, with total median revenue increasing to $602 million. The Index posted a strong median TTM revenue growth rate of 26.4%, up from 24.9% in 3Q21.

However, the median growth rate has declined modestly from 1Q22’s recent peak. Also notable is a shifting distribution of revenue growth rates among companies in the Index. Many companies growing TTM revenue faster than 40% in 3Q21 have now fallen into the lower cohorts of 20-30% and 30-40% TTM revenue growth.

II) Public Market Multiples
EV/Revenue multiples have dropped significantly over the last year, declining from 16.0x in 3Q21 to 6.3x in 3Q22. Incredibly, nearly 71% of companies in the Index traded at greater than 10x in 3Q21, which was the market peak and likely the height of unsustainable irrational exuberance.

Companies trading at >10x+ EV/Revenue in 3Q22 generally outperformed on revenue growth, gross profit margin, and/or EBITDA margin.

III) Product Category Financial Performance
Communications & Collaboration, Dev Ops & IT Management, Sales & Marketing, and Security all posted median TTM revenue growth rates higher than the Index median of 26.4% in 3Q22.

Of all the product categories, Human Capital Management and BI & Analytics posted the most significant YOY increases in TTM revenue growth, increasing from 10.9% to 21.7% and 13.8% to
22.2%, respectively.

While no product category was safe from YoY decline in 3Q22, some held up notably better than others. Security and ERP & Supply Chain maintained the highest EV/Revenue multiples compared to other categories, primarily due to their mission-critical nature and crucial customer reliance on the product offerings.

Interestingly, the Vertically Focused product category has significantly declined in median EV/Revenue, falling 19% below the Index median.

The category’s median gross profit margin of 58.8% was considerably lower than the Index median (71.3%). This notably low gross profit margin is likely the driving factor behind this cohort’s YoY decline. It should not serve as a representation of the many vertically focused companies that post stronger gross profit margins.

Generally, vertically focused companies possess more attractive operating metrics due to the highly specialized nature of their product offering, resulting in more attractive valuation multiples.

Click here to review Software Equity Group’s full report in detail:

In the nascent and uncharted Web3 world of NFTs, crypto and the multiverse, Rick and his teams at Appdetex are doubling down on brand protection.

Many of the world’s largest brands, including four of the five most valuable global businesses, trust Appdetex to process and analyze massive volumes of data from across the internet to detect and address brand misuse.

Here, Rick walks us through how organizations of all sizes can prepare and protect their brand assets from nefarious digital threats.

M.R. Rangaswami: What steps can businesses take to improve how they protect their brand in a world where brand misuse is proliferating at a record pace, online and off?

Rick Farnell: Business today face a tsunami of digital and physical brand threats – including fraud, copyright and trademark infringement (both nefarious and well intentioned), brand impersonation and identity theft, digital and digital-plus-physical counterfeiting, and other types of brand misuse – all of which present a clear and present danger. To address these threats, companies of all sizes should take a proactive approach to securing and protecting their brand and IP online. 

As a first step, companies should implement programs and policies to actively monitor how their brand is being used across digital channels. Monitoring the brand will not only protect companies, but also provide important insights into trends and new potential marketing and engagement opportunities. Once monitoring is established and brand threats have been identified, companies must take action to address instances of brand misuse. This includes removing and remediating brand abuse via brand protection platforms, taking legal action and even turning to law enforcement. 

Forward-looking brands are also going a step further by thinking beyond current brand misuse and taking measures to prevent future abuse. This can include securing relevant domain names, as well as analyzing and correlating previous instances of brand misuse to identify trends. With the right technology and processes in place, businesses can get ahead – and stay ahead – of the tidal wave of digital brand threats on the horizon. 

M.R.: How should Web3 factor into considerations for brand protection in the near term and longer term?

Rick: As Web3 quickly gains in popularity and usage, it will present a host of new challenges for brand protection. In this new mixed reality of the internet, malicious actors are already adapting quickly to profit off of brands, creating a new class of nefarious behavior. 

In the near term, most Web3 threats will predominantly still occur in the Web2 world, such as the theft of crypto wallets and NFTs through phishing attacks. Sophisticated fake communities and deceptively enticing promotions are leading to fraud and are showing up in highly integrated social media, mobile applications, paid internet search and imposter Web2 websites. These fraudulent promotions are intended to entice Web3 enthusiasts to engage and feel like part of “something big.” For example, illicit actors may make claims of a private release of an NFT collection or metaverse property as a ruse to walk away with credentials and assets. 

Longer term, there are a handful of steps brands should take to ensure protection. To start, companies should begin actively monitoring Web3 channels to see how their brand is being used. Next, they should try to secure relevant Web3 domain names. Web3 domains are very different from the Web2 world as there is no centralized authority like ICANN. This means that once a bad actor holds a Web3 domain that infringes on trademarks, it’s extremely difficult to get that domain transferred to the rightful owner. 

M.R.: As C-level executives finalize their budgets for 2023, what do you recommend they focus on?

Rick: Budgeting for 2023 is well underway for most enterprises. With looming reports of economic downturn, many businesses may be tempted to slash budgets across the board – and brand protection is no exception. What business leaders need to realize is that brand misuse is not going away – in fact, as the digital landscape continues to widen, online brand risks will become increasingly prevalent, which can lead to serious ramifications on a business’s bottom line. 

My recommendation for C-level executives is to not take their foot off the pedal when it comes to protecting their brand online. In the year ahead, businesses will need to be increasingly proactive in their approach to protecting their brand, IP, copyrights and more in the evolving digital universe, or risk the consequences. 

M.R. Rangaswami is the Co-Founder of Sandhill.com

What are real-time analytics, and what role do they play in a company’s profit, forecasting and market positioning?

After spending eight years at Facebook, engineering the infrastructure systems for data management, Venkat launched Rockset – and has further advanced his contribution to understanding and harnessing real-time analytics.

M.R. Rangaswami: What is real-time analytics and how does it fit into a company’s data strategy? 

Venkat Venkataramani: Real-time analytics is all about using data as soon as it’s produced to answer questions, make predictions, understand relationships and automate processes. Modern data applications need to process different types of data from multiple sources to initiate specific actions in real-time, such as e-commerce personalization, IoT automation, logistics and delivery tracking, gaming leaderboards, and more.

Until recently, it has been challenging to deliver analytics at the speed and scale required by modern applications. Our company’s real-time analytics platform connects to your data, ingests and indexes any changes in real time, and provides sub-second SQL and data APIs without consuming unnecessary compute, enabling organizations to build data applications at cloud scale.

M.R.: How are real-time analytics helping organizations amid an economic downturn? 

Venkat: The two most important recession-proofing tactics for enterprises are the ability to dial down operating costs through real-time process automation while simultaneously accelerating growth through digital customer experiences.

According to a recent study, US businesses have the opportunity to realize the largest overall impact on revenue increase – potentially $2.3 trillion – from leveraging real-time data analytics, with 73% of manufacturers reporting more efficient rollout processes and 67% of financial firms reporting greater efficiencies. Much like electricity delivers value on pay-per-usage basis, real-time analytics is quickly becoming the latest cloud innovation to provide fast analytics on real-time data on a consumption basis.

M.R.: Where do you see real-time analytics going in the years to come? 

Venkat: 2022 is the year that real-time analytics is going mainstream. We’ve seen strong growth in real-time data over the last several years as more companies are deploying modern, cloud-native data stacks. However, given the current bearish market economy, the efficiency and performance of data systems are more important than ever.

The ballooning costs of data warehouses that were not built for real-time data has driven the shift to real-time databases that are more optimized for critical use cases, including personalized experiences, security analytics, fleet management and leaderboard gamification, just to name a few. 

M.R. Rangaswami is the Co-Founder of Sandhill.com

A combat veteran and Purple Heart recipient who served in U.S. Army Special Operations prior to shifting his focus to the cyber domain, Jeffrey J. Engle has had a fascinating career path that includes hunting for viruses in Kazakhstan to skydiving with the British Special Air Service.

Now the chairman and president of Conquest Cyber, Jeffrey is also the inventor of a cutting-edge Cyber Resiliency Ecosystem Platform & the CEO of 1st Quadrant Services, a Managed Cybersecurity & Compliance Provider.

One of Jeffrey’s focuses has been his work with Native American tribes to improve their cybersecurity. Recent cyberattacks of Native American tribes — including a 2021 attack on the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Nations that shut down their IT systems — have underscored vulnerabilities to bad actors and highlighted the need for tribes to invest in training and security.

This was a fascinating conversation we’re happy to share with you.

M.R. Rangaswami: What makes Native American tribes so vulnerable to cyberattacks?

Jeffrey J Engle: Tribes are no more or less vulnerable to cyberattacks than any other entity across the United States. What makes them unique and, in turn, subject to increased risk is the fact that tribal nations have a broad and diverse attack surface.

Tribal nations have inherently governmental responsibilities, providing health care systems, law enforcement, community support and housing. In addition, they have business interests that are as varied as gaming and defense contracting. This broad attack surface, coupled with many instances of poor telecommunications infrastructure and access to technology during early years, results in a perfect storm of complexity and resource limitation.

M.R.: How do the complex relationships among tribes, the government and law enforcement contribute to the problem?

Jeffrey: Every tribe operates differently, but considerations like indigenous data sovereignty seem to be a universal consideration for tribal nations. When it comes to law enforcement, the additional consideration of criminal justice information services (CJIS) comes into the fold. Beyond that, any interaction of consequence that makes the news increases a tribe’s risk profile, as adversaries seek to further undermine the challenging dynamic of the shared history.

M.R.: What can tribes be doing now to improve their cybersecurity?

Jeffrey: It is critical that all tribal nations and their interests (e.g. business units or healthcare providers) understand where they are in relation to where they want to be. Using the NIST Cybersecurity Framework to provide a structured approach to determining those coordinates is a smart approach. The NIST CSF is best overlaid with a maturity model to further clarify a point where you are achieving the desired outcome versus being able to count on the outcome being consistently achieved over time.

This allows application of compliance requirements that are industry specific — e.g. HIPAA or DFARS, basic cyber hygiene or prescriptive cyber insurance requirements to get progress started. Once you have a clear picture, we always recommend eliminating the tech or processes you do not need, simplifying the things you do and automating everything you can.

This frees up the team to think, plan and do, rather than just react to the situations that hit them that day.

M.R. Rangaswami is the Co-Founder of Sandhill.com

Gaurav Bhasin, Managing Director, Allied Advisers

According to Allied Advisors’s most recent report, any emerging SaaS firms are contemplating a Vertical SaaS model to target a specific niche, allowing them to focus better on client demands and making them easier to market. 

Vertical SaaS is witnessing growing emergence of start-ups with smaller but more focused TAM (as compared with Horizontal SaaS) and more capital efficient business models.

COVID-19 severely impacted some Vertical SaaS niche markets but accelerated overall digital transformation across industries, followed by the realization that standardized solutions will not suffice.

We see continued investor interest in  Vertical SaaS due to high growth  prospects supported by strong business  fundamentals, along with better  performance on multiple metrics than  peer Horizontal SaaS companies. 

4 DRIVERS OF VERTICAL SAAS ARE:

1. Industry-specific solutions promotes growth

More robust and focused solutions that appeal to the client’s and the specific industry’s needs.
‒ Products and solutions are constantly updated in response to changing regulatory needs.

2. Higher upsell opportunities help growth

Immediate and significant value to companies looking for focused solutions; increased upsell opportunities due to the demonstrated value. ‒ As per studies, upsell costs only ~24% of the
cost of acquiring a new customer.

3. Lower S&M cost drives capital efficient growth

i. Focused and cost-effective approach to marketing due to narrowly defined customer requirements.
‒ Fewer marketing resources required and faster customer acquisition achieved.

ii. Blossom Street Ventures estimates that vertical companies can achieve up to 8x cheaper CAC vs
horizontal peers.

4. Increased customer trust drives demand

Having knowledge of the market and networking with key players acts as a distinct advantage and
builds customer confidence.

‒ Working closely with experts allows them to keep up with industry requirements and technical issues, leading to greater reliability, higher customization and better performance at industry-specific metrics and KPIs.

2 DRIVERS OF SAAS ARE:

1. Companies are typically focused on a smaller niche market, making it challenging to find new leads, and are exposed to adverse events impacting their target sector; e.g. COVID-19 had severely impacted VSaaS companies in sectors like hospitality and travel, helped companies in collaboration.

2. Lower TAM can be a key challenge with limited options to diversify; companies overcome this by providing additional offerings to existing customer base; e.g. Veeva expanded their product offerings to the healthcare sector rapidly increasing their growth and available TAM.

For a further insights on Allied Advisor’s full fall report, click below.

This week we’re keeping it short and snappy with SEG’s SaaS Index Overview, released August 2022.

Public SaaS company valuations continue to hover above July lows, reaching 6.7x EV/Revenue in August compared to July’s 6.0x multiple.

This volatility will continue as the tug of war between fighting inflation and avoiding a recession plays out.

Here are three highlights from the overview:

• Human capital management continues to lead all other product categories, as the cohort gained 4.4% from July to August after being down 21% YTD in July.
  
• Communications and Collaboration posted the lowest YTD price performance, with equities in the category declining 56.7% thus far in 2022. The product category has continued to come back to earth after it experienced exorbitant highs due to the rapid acceleration of remote work experienced during COVID.
  
• Qualys (10.7%), PowerSchool (9.3%), and Alteryx (3%) are three of five companies posting positive YTD returns.

Here is SEG’s full report:

Fast approaching are the days we can identify congestive heart failure through AI and a smartphone app – and Tamir Tal, CEO of Cordio Medical, a medical speech analytics platform, are at the forefront of this development.

Using AI to compare each day’s vocal signature with the baseline, this app, still in clinical testing, is called the HearO where patients open the app and speak the same sentence on their phones daily. If altered fluid states are detected, an alert immediately sends a message to their clinician.

Before Cordio Medical, Tamir took his 20+ years of experience in operations, finance and development to serve as COO at Neovasc Medical Ltd., a cardiovascular medical device company that developed the Neovasc Reducer™ for the treatment of refractory angina.

This was an eye-opening conversation about the future of medical-grade portable devices:

M.R. Rangaswami: Do you believe voice recognition technology will be a leading at-home diagnostic tool?

Tamir Tal: Voice recognition technology will soon be a leading at-home tool because speech recognition technologies have two significant advantages: 

1) They are easy to use and induce very high patient compliance – meaning patients find the app and their own smartphone easy to use and do not discontinue use. This level of compliance is significant because at-home monitoring is engraved into the patient’s life for many years and needs to become part of the patient’s daily habits to have true adherence.

2) Speech and voice are very personal and allow practitioners to generate clinical information that cannot be achieved from other measurement tactics. For example, a mother (and MD) can detect changes in health just by listening. This represents an excellent analogy to the speech processing technology, which is based on signal processing and AI.

M.R.: What do investors need to understand about the impact of global medical grade portable medical devices?

Tamir: Medical grade mobile as a medical device solution is the future of healthcare. The ability to transform standard mobile devices, such as smartphones, into advanced medical diagnostic tools allows for a cost-effective, easy-to-use health monitoring device for patients. Overall, the capital expense is minimal, and the distribution and adoption are easy for patients and providers. 

M.R.: Since telemedicine has rapidly picked up since the Covid-19 pandemic, how do you believe portable medical devices will impact office visits?

Tamir: The impact of mobile as a medical device solution has allowed for better patient care for healthcare practitioners. The ability to monitor patients almost constantly or daily provides instantaneous diagnostics. Hospitalization or clinic visits are becoming less common, as practitioners can measure the severity of a patient’s condition remotely by using telemedicine and portable medical devices.

M.R. Rangaswami is the Co-Founder of Sandhill.com

As the founder of data lineage platform MANTA, CEO, Tomas Kratky is helping organizations fix blind spots to gain full control and visibility of their data pipelines. Prior to MANTA, he led Profinit, one of the most successful consulting businesses in Central Europe and has 20+ years of experience as an accomplished software developer and IT consultant.

Here we talk about everything from raises to data lineage and trends.

M.R. Rangaswami: Tell us about MANTA’s origin story and recent company momentum, including how you raised $35 million in Series B funding amidst an economic downturn 

Tomas Kratky: I founded MANTA in 2016 after seeing a need for a solution to help organizations navigate the increasingly complex data systems. A very key capability every organization must have to stay successful in the modern, fast changing and highly competitive world is the ability to change things, and do it quickly and safely.

Based on my own experience as a consultant and developer, it was clear that the exploding complexity of enterprise data environments was making it impossible, slowing organizations down and increasing the risk of major data incidents. Organizations needed an always up-to-date, detailed, accurate, intelligent, and actionable map of data pipelines and all data dependencies to help safely and efficiently navigate the data environment. Building that map was the first step on the MANTA journey.

With strong growth following our company launch, we were fortunate to secure our Series B funding at the cusp of the economic downturn. Our technology has proven to be a critical tool for organizations looking to cut costs and streamline processes during these uncertain economic times. The answer to improving productivity while decreasing costs is almost always automation, and we are seeing more organizations turn to data lineage to enable agile and efficient change management and to achieve accurate, high quality data that drives productivity while offering important insight into business operations.

M.R.: What is data lineage and how does it fit into a company’s data strategy?

Tomas: Data is an organization’s most critical asset, yet many are struggling with side effects of the exploding data stack that has evolved into a complex ecosystem with thousands of components. Data does not start with your data lake and does not end with your analytics or reporting. It is produced and consumed by every application in your enterprise.

The complexity of expanding, highly interconnected data environments has left many enterprises faced with the inability to deliver required changes fast enough, resulting in increased risk exposure, more material incidents and engineering resources wasted on manual, repetitive tasks. 

Data lineage is a tool that solves these intricate challenges by reaching every corner of data environments to offer complete visibility into data ecosystems, no matter how complex they are. Having a complete, clear and comprehensive map of all data flows, sources, transformations and dependencies enables organizations to spend less time figuring out their data and more time putting it to good use

M.R.: Can you share insight into the current state of the data lineage market and what trends are driving interest?

Tomas: Data lineage is very quickly evolving from a critical capability of your compliance framework (understanding data movement and provenance to protect sensitive data, or to ensure explainability for key indicators and metrics reported to internal audit or external regulators) to a foundational layer of the modern data fabric architecture design.

Understanding both technical and non-technical dependencies in your data environment and improving visibility of your key data pipelines is something we see all successful enterprises doing today. It is even more critical when you start thinking about digital transformation projects that the whole industry is going through. They are all about change, which makes visibility and data lineage essential for their success.

Another big trend is a shift towards active metadata. Something we have seen and have been doing since our early days, metadata is not something you should consolidate in a silo (data catalog or metadata repository). Metadata must be delivered to people, machines, and places where it is needed to automate, simplify and improve productivity.

Simple examples from MANTA’s daily life are: integrating automated impact analysis early into a development cycle to prevent incidents and broken dependencies, actively monitoring data pipelines to identify and notify about any potential material issues, or allowing report users to understand data lineage for critical metrics they care about without leaving their workspace. Overall, we see our customers’ productivity going up by 30% to 40%. With basically an endless list of ways how activated metadata can help, this space is very exciting.

M.R. Rangaswami is the Co-Founder of Sandhill.com

Four years ago, we interviewed Toby as the SVP of Verizon and where the world of 5G was taking us. The tech world has shifted and accelerated dramatically since then and when Toby, now CEO of Verus Advisory, wrote us to say, “The next 3-4 years in the hacking space is going to make the last 10 years look like kindergarten” we were very keen to hear more.

M.R. Rangaswami: Is all the buzz about the 4th Industrial Revolution (4IR) warranted?

Toby Eduardo Renshaw: Yes it is warranted but 4IR is only part of the story. 

The 4IR is simply that over the next several years we will see a hockey stick growth in the utility, scale, impact, value and adoption of 4 technologies: IoT/Sensorization, Big Data/AI, Cloud and XR. These advances will feed off each other as they will live on a super low latency, fat bandwidth, real-time edge compute capable fabric. That’s simply 5G. Don’t think of 5G as just a network it’s a connected compute fabric. Those five together will create a fly-wheel effect that will be massively disruptive.

In parallel, there are 10 other change waves hitting in the same period, for example the socioeconomic impacts of the Gen Z ascendency, a quantum leap in cyber threats , the acceleration of low code no code, the lego-ization and automation of AI, 100x improvements in hyperscale data, 20x in utility per dollar from satellites, etc

We are entering the biggest creative destruction cycle in 100 years with huge opportunity for the winners but as Schumpeter has taught us with a big dose of destruction for some.

M.R.: What is it that enterprises are missing about these change intensive times ?

Toby: The scale and rapidity of change. The last Industrial Revolution changed the world. This change cycle will too. As before there will be winners and losers at a company level but also sector and national level. The biggest difference is, the last one took decades, and this one will take eight years or less.

In times like this it is those that innovative at the model level that win big not the ones who use the new innovations to improve the existing model. That is hard to do for enterprises, especially successful ones. 

M.R.: What are a couple of pragmatic things Enterprise are not generally doing that they should in anticipation of this ?

Toby: Really understand your own culture and change it. As we move into these times of hyper change it is highly unlikely that your existing culture is fully tuned/structured for this. 

First, have an external party document your rhetoric about your culture. What you say about it, what you brag about, what is on your plaques and on your website, what stories you tell yourself. 

Then have a second party truly document the behaviors and the facts that are prevalent in the company. A simple one that is usually a shocker is lots of companies say they are diversity sensitive, focused, engaged and have been for a while. Check Latinos in middle management. That number is usually miles off its statistical representation. Check other diversity numbers and trends. If those aren’t readily available then you are more rhetoric than reality.

Do not rethink your rhetoric. Rethink what drives behaviors and that is simply have a really well communicated and executed reward and punishment structure around the behaviors you want and don’t want. A lot of firms are good at rewarding the positive behaviors they want and terrible at punishing folks for the ones they don’t want. The sum of your behaviors at a company is your culture.

Here’s a question to ponder: How do you reward smart bets that didn’t pay off? We want a smart bet behavior where every bet doesn’t pay off. You often see non-competitive sandbagging. It is very common at firms because there is punishment for missing plan and reward for hitting plan. So you aim  low and hit plan, you make a few weak safe bets.

That second thing is non-competitive sandbagging and is very common at firms because there is punishment for missing plan and reward for hitting plan. So you aim  low and hit plan, you make a few weak safe bets.

M.R. Rangaswami is the Co-Founder of Sandhill.com

Gaurav Bhasin, Managing Director, Allied Advisers

According to Allied Advisors in their Q3 report, last twelve years has been a robust market for M&A and capital raises for technology companies. Lately with volatile markets like we’ve had in 2022 and potentially being on the cusp of a recession, the question of “are the market conditions right” frequently comes up in the minds of investors and executives interested in exploring M&A.

Here are five focus points that will positively impact M&A in a volatile market:

1. Record dry powder capital with Private Equity (PE) and Strategics 

Mega funds have been raised and sponsors are sitting on a record level of dry powder, estimated¹ to be $1.9T¹ as of June 2022; with leverage the amount is as large as $7.5T. While the current market turmoil and increase  in borrowing rates have slightly dampened the pace of PE investments, the financial sponsor industry will  continue to be a major driver of M&A. 

2. Limited private financing and IPO / SPAC makes M&A attractive 

Privately held companies seeking capital for sustenance and growth will be challenged in volatile markets for  raising financing. Venture deals for technology companies have been significantly impacted as investors have  become more selective, focusing on companies that are able to meet revenue targets, are profitable or have a  clear near-term path to profitability. The chart below shows the declines in volume and valuation of VC deals  in 2022 as compared to 2021 for technology companies. High profile companies like Klarna recently raised  $800M slashing its valuation by 85% per Reuters and there are other late stage private companies which have  seen similar down-rounds. 

3. Select technology sectors continue to be resilient attracting buyers 

Companies with advanced technologies, large addressable markets, great product-market fit, strong
differentiation, mission critical software and superlative teams will do well in M&A and become attractive
targets for strategic and PE. Strategies often do the “buy vs. build” analysis and frequently decide it is better to buy than build and PE firms evaluate how they can bolster growth with capital and disciplined growth.

4. Valuation adjustments gets new strategic buyers out of the woodworks

The rapid rise in private company financing valuation at 50x, 100x or more ARR had many disciplined buyers priced out of the market. We are seeing increasing outbounds from corporate development at these companies to us who are now looking to deploy capital more aggressively into acquiring companies.

5. Run a competitive process and show scarcity
While valuation analysis and current comparable yields a certain baseline value, competition for your company from PE or strategic (ideally both) helps to achieve premium valuation. We have often been in
situations where there is a wide range of valuations when a process is run as strategic, and PE have different abilities to pay and assess synergies differently. Well prepared companies create multiple options by generating multiple term sheets from PE and strategics, thereby making it competitive.

For a further insights on Navigating M&A in Uncertain Markets in Q3 see Allied Advisor’s full report.

Founding his company to dramatically improve the analytics solutions available to Direct-to-Consumer and other e-commerce companies, CEO Brian Eberman and his team provide companies with the forecasts, insights, and operating data they need to run their growing business across multiple sales and advertising channels.

With 13 patents in Speech Technology, Internet Search, and Robotics along with a Ph.D., M.S., and Bachelor’s Degrees from MIT, Brian has a deep understanding of AI, Robotics and how data analytic focused companies can improve their processes.

M.R. Rangaswami: The Direct To Consumer market has hit a few headwinds lately.  What are some of the more recent challenges you are seeing in the category and how are companies adjusting?

Brian Eberman: These are definitely interesting times for direct to consumer (DTC) brands and e-commerce brands overall.  In speaking to our customers the following seems to be the most common challenges they are trying to resolve:

Supply chain is still a problem

The pandemic caused major disruptions to the supply chain. And as brands started to get products back in stock the growth of e-commerce slowed so many now have an inventory overhang.  Inflation and gas prices also skyrocketed adding to delivery costs and holding costs. Even the price of CO² for beer is up 20%.

E-commerce growth is still up, but slowing. 

Consumers spent almost  2 years sequestered in their homes buying primarily groceries and durable goods from their couch.  Now people are returning to retail stores, eating out, traveling, etc.  So that bucket of discretionary dollars DTCs were able to tap into is suddenly a lot smaller.

Ad costs are up.

Platforms like Meta and Google were great channels for brands to acquire customers relatively cheaply. But the secret is out and everyone is using the same playbook causing a sharp increase in price – nearly 40% based on some reports. 

iOS 14 

As if to pour more salt in the Meta and Google ad wound, Apple decided to eliminate tracking cookies and MAIDs with their iOS 14 release, citing privacy concerns, and essentially wiping out DTCs ability to track sales of their products back to their ad campaigns. 

M.R.: What role does data analytics play in helping these companies and other e-commerce companies navigate these new market dynamics.

Brian: Data analytics plays a key role in helping DTC address these short to longer term challenges. Let’s look at the iOS 14 tracking issue first because the gap is pretty straightforward and this problem has been getting a good amount of attention lately. 

To address deprecation of cookies and MAIDs, DTCs are using first party server-side tracking, which is still respected by the browser, to collect first party data that can then be paired with analytics to build attribution models that can track sales back to their ad channels and campaigns.

These models are by no means perfect.  They are click-based because they can’t see the customer advertising views, however, early indications suggest they provide longer term attribution and better cross-channel attribution than what’s currently being provided by ad channels themselves.In light of the other challenges, and from investor pressure, we are seeing DTCs shift their strategic focus away from hyper growth and more towards sustainable profitability.

So in addition to measuring media metrics, like ROAS, companies are interested in using data analytics to accurately measure the contribution profit of their business and evaluate the performance of each of their brands and products based on this metric. 

If supply chain issues and slower e-commerce growth continues, DTCs want to know which brands and products they should focus their efforts on. In addition to this, there is definitely a renewed focus on customer lifetime value (CLV) among DTCs.

They are looking to leverage analytics and data science to more accurately compute their customers’ CLV based on behavior and other data attributes.  Their objective is to identify customers with the highest projected CLV and leverage this data in their marketing, product choice, and financial forecasting.  For example: they can customize retention strategies towards customers with high CLV projections, they can use customers to also develop “look-a-like” models for ad targeting, they can use CLV as a signal to train machine-drive optimization in ad channels. 

M.R.: What are some of the gaps you see in these current data analytics tech stacks and services that these companies rely on and how do you see these solutions evolving?

Brian: I think most of the e-commerce analytics stacks that we see DTCs investing in were initially designed to measure and optimize digital advertising.  So while many of them have robust ad reporting systems, they are pretty light on actual data analytics and even more so on data science.  Even the dashboards are prescribed to provide aggregate ad reports.  So the application is limited to marketing, even though there are several parts of the business that contribute to profits.Here’s how we see data analytics evolving:

Optimize the performance of the customer versus the media channel.

Instead of looking at the performance of broad based cohorts in ad campaigns, these systems will look at the performance of  individual customers as measured by CLV versus the cost to acquire them.

Develop accurate forecasting and prediction models.

These systems will include causal modeling technology that takes a set of customer behaviors and hundreds of other data attributes to accurately predict future behavior, e.g. projected CLV, Churn probability, etc.

Cross-departmental integration. Data analytics systems will be able to ingest data from all parts of the business, create integrated analytics, and publish reports that give operators much deeper insight to help them optimize the business.  Example, finance can share inventory data with marketing to optimize merchandising and promotions.  Marketing can project forward customer sales as a function of advertising spend which provides finance with gross cash projections.

M.R. Rangaswami is the Co-Founder of Sandhill.com

The SEG SaaS Index is a list of publicly traded companies that they have determined to be SaaS businesses (i.e., they primarily offer solutions via the cloud and may have a subscription or transaction-based pricing model).

Q2 posted 580 SaaS M&A transactions and amounted to one of the most active quarters on record.

Here are four highlight updates from the 2022 Q2 Report.

I) Deal Volume
With the addition of 580 SaaS M&A deals in Q2, just shy of Q1’s 616 deals, the first half of 2022 posted the highest deal volume on record and was up 58% over the first half of 2021.

Given the macro uncertainty and the unprecedented transaction volume in 1H22, we estimate M&A deal
volume will slow down in the second half of 2022. However, we anticipate deal volume will increase YOY as demand for SaaS companies remains high among cash-rich private equity investors (who make up 60%+ of the market) and strategic buyers looking to plug product gaps and enter new markets.

II) Median EV/TTM Revenue Multiple
2Q22’s median 6.4x EV/Revenue multiple dropped 16.9% from 1Q22, yet only declined 4.5% YOY. Notably, M&A multiples are holding up relatively strong compared to multiples of publicly-traded SaaS companies (53.0% YOY decline vs. 4.5%).

The relative stability of M&A multiples speaks to strong demand (and competition in M&A processes) for high quality (mission critical, strong revenue growth, solid gross retention, profitability, or near-term path to profitability) among both strategic and private equity buyers. Private equity buyers, in particular, can look beyond near-term changes in investor sentiment and leverage their longer-term investment time horizon when evaluating a business and its long-term market and financial prospects.


III) Target Market Focus
Targets with a vertical-market focus made up approximately 34% of all SaaS deals in 2Q22. This finding deviates slightly from the typical 60/40 split between horizontal and vertical in previous quarters.

Healthcare continues to lead the pack in terms of deal volume. Noteworthy deals include the acquisitions of Change Healthcare (certain assets) by TPG Capital ($2.2B), MEDIFOX DAN by
ResMed ($1B), and Prescribe Wellness by Transaction Data Systems ($125M).

IV) Buyer Backing
Private equity-driven deals continue to dominate SaaS M&A deal volume in 2Q22. PE investors have raised record amounts of capital, serving as a catalyst for their consistent activity.

Historically, past quarters reflected a more even balance of private equity and strategic deals.

Click here for the full SEG 2Q22 SaaS Public Market Update.

In May, founder of CXApp, Leon Papkoff celebrated the one-year anniversary of its acquisition by Inpixon (Nasdaq: INPX) – the Bay Area Indoor Intelligence company that is doing some exciting work enabling office return to work policies and helping un-snarl supply chain issues.

Leon’s story is unique as the sale of CXApp occurred in the middle of the pandemic, which both made the CXApp more valuable (one of its key use cases is improving the health and safety conditions of an in-person office), as well as forced he and his team to get creative when going through the process sans an office. 

As we know the Pandemic created micro-communities within greater communities due to “stay at home” mandates, so Leon was not able to take part in the one-on-one meetings for advice, consider offers and help his decision along.

In fact, his bubble of influence were his neighbors in his neighborhood in Pleasanton Calif., literally on the street he lived on—as he, like all of us, was forced to spend most of his time at home during lockdown. Lucky his neighbors were made up of other entrepreneurs, VCs and leadership types, so the advice he secured from them was in many cases based on their own experiences.

M.R. Rangaswami: You recently celebrated the 1-year anniversary of The CXApp (now Inpixon Enterprise Apps). What was unique about the acquisition process seeing the majority of it took place in the middle of the early days of the Pandemic?

Leon Papkoff: The most unique thing about the acquisition of The CXApp was timing. About two years prior to the pandemic, we had rolled out our ‘Smart Campus’ solution to address the opportunity for on-the-go experiences for enterprises. We quickly caught the eye of many of the Fortune 500 and began rolling out deployments to customers, many big-name Silicon Valley tech firms among them. Our target customers were forward-thinking companies looking to make a transformative impact in the workplace with an IoT approach to workplace experience.

At the time, the market labeled this as a ‘nice to have’ product, but once the pandemic hit, the market quickly shifted its perspective of our workplace experience app to a ‘must have’ product. Two key benefits of our solution were to maintain high levels of employee engagement amongst a distributed workforce and to aid in bringing employees back into the office space safely and confidently. With this strong product-market fit, and as we rolled out our native desk booking and spaces reservation capabilities, we experienced a strong growth spurt.

It was at this time that we had our first meetings with Inpixon, and we subsequently integrated their mapping product into our platform for a few of our key customers that wanted advanced indoor navigation and wayfinding capabilities. The use cases for an employee app that helps companies address the new workplace realities were and continue to be numerous. Even now, two years later, the demand for companies to support flex work environments persists along with the need to bridge the experience gap for in-person and remote experiences.

Because of our strong growth and great working relationship, the Inpixon team expressed interest in acquiring The CXApp. We had similar inquiries from other groups as well, however we chose to go through due diligence and sign a letter of intent (LOI) with Inpixon because we felt it was a good strategic match and that they could help us scale quickly.

Overall, the idea of The CXApp + Inpixon brought other capabilities and technologies into our growing ecosystem that would allow us to have a more well-rounded and powerful solution for our customers.

The timing could not have been better.

Another unique aspect of the courtship and transaction was the style in which we conducted our meetings throughout the due diligence process. All of that was done virtually through collaboration tools like Zoom and Teams, including highly confidential meetings with Nadir Ali, Inpixon’s CEO, and Soumya Das, Inpixon’s COO. It was more difficult in some ways, but also lent a nice platform for us to communicate.

We took the same approach with internal meetings as well. I used the same video conferencing tools to meet with The CXApp leadership team and conduct working sessions throughout the due diligence process. Anyone that’s gone through an acquisition knows how intense this process can be and the substantial volume of items that needed to be aggregated and coded and sent back to the acquisition team. It was in this way that we collaborated and combed through years of company data to present to Inpixon.

Near the end of the process, we were still in the height of the pandemic, so we continued to use virtual collaboration tools. Our official acquisition announcement was made virtually, with cameras on, of course, across our global team with employees across the United States, the Philippines, and China.

Normally I would have flown overseas to meet with the team, talked them through the process in-person, conducted 1:1 meetings with team leads, and ensured that every employee was comfortable with the news. But, because of the pandemic, I needed to reassure teams remotely and even still conduct 1:1’s within each department. It was a big announcement, and I cared about each individual, so I wanted to make sure they felt confident in their jobs and well being, which of course, Inpixon was invested in as well.

Coincidentally, the day the acquisition was official, there was an Inpixon leadership off-site happening in Northern California, so I was able to attend and meet all of the leaders in-person for the first time which was a pretty amazing experience.

M.R.: Tell us more about the unique counsel you engaged with through the process.

Leon: The entire process took about five months, and I can say with certainty it helped to be backed by a diverse team of experts. I brought in a number of individuals to help with different stages of the acquisition process from negotiations, through due diligence, to signing the LOI, and even for final signature on the definitive agreement. I had one law firm that managed the entire acquisition itself.

I also brought in a very good colleague of mine as an advisor. He had experience in M&As for larger corporations, and I knew his guidance would be critically important for the leadership team to help make the best fiduciary decisions on behalf of our shareholders.

The combined experience with these individuals that have their own skill set beyond mine was especially helpful for such a small company.

M.R. What are your 3-5 tips you would offer other startup owners to consider before they sell their business?

Leon: Firstly, timing is critical. If you’re planning an acquisition strategy, expedite when you start to see velocity with your product, customers, and the market.

Secondly, partner with strategic companies. When you have a robust partner strategy, you add more value to your product. Similar to networking, use your business positioning to grow your network of products, vendors, partners, potential acquirers, etc.

Thirdly, keep tight organization on your intellectual property. If you have a product that is engineered, write code natively from scratch to keep it clean.

And lastly – listen to the experts. Invest in third-party experts. Try to bring in strong advisors that have experience in M&A to help you negotiate the best offer for your shareholders and to protect your interest. You’re responsible for more than just yourself.

Have open conversations with your leadership team. Be open to discuss key decisions with top leaders in your organization. Different perspectives help round out the entire position of your product, strengths and weaknesses, and even aspects of the deal. I value my leadership team’s opinions, so it really helps me to talk out loud and bounce ideas around to nurture organic brainstorming and assessment. I go through that process anytime I make a big decision to ensure my ideas are the best ideas, and if not, I have strength in knowing that my trusted peers will help me arrive at the best conclusion for everyone. 

M.R. Rangaswami is the Co-Founder of Sandhill.com

A Look at the Technologies and  Economics Powering India’s Progress

If you’ve been watching, India’s growth is no surprise.

Over the past decade, innovation and policy have converged to shape an increasingly
entrepreneurial and digitally -enabled India. The confluence of smartphone proliferation, affordable mobile data and the establishment of a widely-adopted digital payment infrastructure rapidly digitized small and mid-size businesses.

COVID only accelerated this trend. In May 2022, India marked its 100th unicorn with a sense of “we’ve arrived,” but this is just the tip of the iceberg. India is a leader in global SaaS — with the likes of Freshworks, ChargeBee, Innovaccer, Uniphore, and Postman— and has a flourishing domestic
technology market: 83% of unicorns serve Indian businesses and consumers.

Foreign direct investment, boosted by reforms and production -linked incentives, reached $84 billion in fiscal year 1 2022. In light of supply chain shocks, companies like Apple
and Samsung are seeking to diversify their respective smartphone manufacturing
by expanding their operations in India. Through production-linked incentives, the Indian
government has taken steps to bolster smartphone manufacturing and establish key
industries such as semiconductors.

India has not been immune to global macroeconomic events such as rising fuel prices
and supply chain congestion. Inflationary pressures prompted the Reserve Bank of India
(RBI) to raise rates, as a result public and private markets pull back.

For the remainder of 2022, we expect muted private investment, lower company valuations, slower
unicorn creation and delayed IPOs. We don’t expect 2022 to exceed last year’s record
$36B of VC investment, but we feel confidant Indian VC investment is on track to
surpass the years prior to 2021.

The below SVB Global Research Report Highlights:

MACRO VIEW: INDIA’S INNOVATIVE ECONOMY

India currently ranks as the sixth-largest economy globally, growing 45% since 2014 with a CAGR1 of 5.4%. Tactical reforms, such as the Make in India initiative, have increased the ease of doing business in a country that has favorable talent demographics.

Over half the population is under 30, and in the 2019-2020 academic year, India had 30.6 million undergraduates, 3.85M are studying engineering and technology.

VENTURE ECOSYSTEM: INVESTMENTS, FUNDS & EXITS

“Indus Valley” was coined by Blume Ventures as a moniker for the Indian Startup ecosystem. It spans from tier-1 cities — major metros designated by population: Bengaluru, Chennai, Delhi-NCR, Hyderabad, Kolkata, Mumbai, Ahmedabad, and Pune — to rural hubs.

Much like the rise of emerging hubs in the US (Atlanta, Austin, Miami), tier-2 cities like Jaipur, Kochi, and Indore are gaining a reputation for their startup scenes. Lower cost of living, access to talent, and a reduction in the digital infrastructure gap have laid the foundations for startups based in tier-2 cities to
thrive.

Local incubators such as TiE-Rajasthan, The Kerala Startup Mission, and Indore Smart Seed act as catalysts providing programming, space, and support.

THE NETWORK EFFECT: INDIA’S GLOBLA PRESENCE

India has the world’s largest diaspora. The UN estimates that 18 million Indians live abroad, and that number nearly doubles to about 32 million when accounting for people of Indian origin. The diaspora has created a global community with shared roots that strongly emphasizes educational
achievement and entrepreneurship.

For example, Indian students make up the second largest international student population in the US,3 and of the 500 unicorns founded in the US between 1999-2019, 90 of the 1,078 founders are Indian immigrants.

These synergies have helped create a network of tech leaders internationally and within India.

2022 & BEYOND: A VIEW FROM THE TOP

GLOBAL TECH TRADE: Recent trade deals with UAE, Israel, Australia, and US, including the IndoPacific Economic Framework emphasize the digital economy.

SEMICONDUCTOR HUB: India estimates its semiconductor market will reach $63 billion by 2026. In 2021, The India Semiconductor Mission (ISM) allocated $10B to help companies establish manufacturing in India. In 2022, Vedanta and Foxconn announced plans for a $20B plant in India, and the ISMC announced a $3B chip fab.

To read the full SVB Global Research Report, see below.

A serial entrepreneur who had founded four companies and had two successful exits, Improvado CEO, Daniel Kravtsov, learned after hundreds of meetings with digital media agencies and businesses, that all of them found it painful to monitor and report on digital ad campaigns.

Daniel’s reporting products and style, aggregates data across all marketing campaigns into one centralized dashboard. It has been such a saught after service, it pushed Daniel to created what is now Improvado.io – a tool that helps enterprises and ad agencies aggregate their marketing data in one place, in real time. 

M.R. Rangaswami: How should companies think and calculate Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) and Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC), that would give them a deeper understanding of their complexity help companies increase their revenue?

Daniel Kravtsov: Each company needs to decide how it will calculate ROAS. One company may base ROAS on all Net New Revenue. Another might base it on Net New Marketing Revenue. A third might focus on the marginal fraction of Net New Marketing Revenue minus prime costs (which a company will spend anyway while creating a product).

Then the company has to get clear on how it calculates CAC. If a prospect sees your ad, for example, then reads an article mentioning your company, then reads a blog post, and finally converts through a paid organic click, each of those touches has a cost. One of the touches represented a direct conversion, but if you turned off all the campaigns except the one that directly converted, you would likely experience a big drop in conversion. 

The modern data stack was created to help execute and understand such omnichannel campaigns. 
In general, marketers ought to spend their digital ad dollars more shrewdly in order to create a more consistent return on ad spend. Here are some of the reasons they don’t do this:

• Growing data complexity. Some departments have more tools than employees. In order to gain a true understanding of Return on Ad Spend, or ROAS, the company has to fetch, normalize, format and combine the data from each of those tools. Few companies invest the resources to do that. 

• Unattributed data and analytics misconfigurations. If your web analytics are broken or degraded, you won’t be able to properly connect leads directly with ad metrics. 

• The rise of the modern data stack. It can be convenient to use CRMs to attribute marketing data. However, to do this effectively requires the routing of countless data sources into a CRM, followed by a lot of attention from data engineers and analysts. Moreover, the inflow of marketing metrics offers conflicting indicators for a single entry, thus demanding an external system to pre-process and harmonize it. We’re in the era of omnichannel, where a decent lead comes only after a dozen or so marketing touches. That fact further increases the complexity of such a setup, making it more challenging to assess the Customer Acquisition Cost. 

Companies need to acknowledge these complexities in order to address them. 


M.R.: Marketers often look at the number of touchpoints it takes to convert a customer’s early interest to revenue. How can marketers develop a greater understanding of that customer journey, and focus their marketing efforts to be less expensive? 

D.K.: Fortunately, for the first time, revenue attribution models show marketers exactly how much it costs to bring prospective customers to each point of the journey, from awareness to purchase. Such models, when built properly, can show where the revenue comes from.
  
In a three-step customer journey, for example, we can measure first-touch attribution, last-touch attribution, and time-decay/reverse time-decay, in which we attribute revenue to steps that vary depending on when they occur.
  
Omnichannel attribution enables marketers to look at the data from different angles and to experiment, taking those angles into account.
 
However, implementation is not at all simple. You have to record events across different channels, collect them in a single storage location (data warehouses are the new nerve centers), normalize the data across channels, and then attribute revenue to channels based on the occurrences of similar touches in the customer journey of your prospects in order to determine which ones are likely to become ideal customers.
 
Global marketers, in particular, should study these models as they examine the impact of their cross-regional marketing, looking for similarities and differences in the behaviors of their ideal-customer cohorts. There’s no substitute for understanding how each ad contributes to the bottom line.
  
As part of this process, data warehouses have become the new nerve center of marketing organizations. Rather than scattered information across multiple tools, they serve as a central data storage, making it easier to connect vast amounts of data to BI and Analytics tools for further visualization and analysis.

Yet, data warehouses alone aren’t a silver bullet to cut on the data complexity. It’s not about piling up data at a central (or cloud) location — it’s about how you make use of that data.
 

M.R.: What would be the optimal pace of launching new experiments, and how can marketers ensure they have the right mix of short-term and long-term experiments?

D.K.: In our work with companies, agencies and brands, the biggest predictor of campaign success is the use of rapid experimentation and real-time measurement.

What determines whether you’re going to get the most out of a channel or not is directly connected to the frequency of your experiments, and how well you can measure them to synthesize the insights. 
Iteration matters more than your budget, your time or even your creative assets.

If you want to get the most out of your investment in each ad channel of your choice and control for variables (for example, which message, which targeting, which time of day, which creative and which tactics worked best), you can’t just stop there; you have to dig deeper.

You need to be able to ask more detailed questions, compare different segments and deploy multiples of the same campaign, with slightly varied parameters.

The most successful companies and marketers launch new campaigns daily. Or more precisely, they launch new experiments every day. And the more experiments they launch, the more they learn about what works and why.

Although it may sound funny, the best way to ensure that you have the right mix of short-term and long-term experiments is to … experiment with your mix!  

M.R. Rangaswami is the Co-Founder of Sandhill.com

Before co-founding Lightspin, CEO Vladi established the comprehensive application security training program at Ernst & Young and initiated the first Automotive Cloud Security team at CYMOTIVE.

An avid security entrepreneur with a career in cybersecurity domains, Vladi Sandler used his experience to start Lightspin – a proactive cloud security platform that protects cloud and Kubernetes environments from unknown risks.

M.R.: You launched a startup right before the pandemic. Upon reflection, what benefits did you experience as a result?

Vladi Sandler: We launched Lightspin in January 2020, mere months before the global pandemic. While at the moment it felt daunting, I now realize there were several key benefits to launching a startup
during that time frame.

First, we quickly gained access to the global market – in person meetings stopped, so I was able to meet via Zoom with the best companies in the world in minutes.

We did more customer meetings and were able to quickly develop personal relationships. We raised
funding during that time as well; being virtual allowed us to connect with VCs all over the
country and alleviated the cross-country flights and additional overhead costs of travel.

We invested in talent and secured an incredible office space for a very reasonable price.

On a personal note, my daughter was six months old when we launched the company. Instead
of being away from home during that pivotal time, I was able to conduct business via Zoom and
be there for my family.

M.R.: As organizations embrace the cloud, what are the pitfalls or security risks they should be
aware of?

Vladi: Cloud threats are on the rise. At any point in time, sensitive data can move between 2,481 different cloud apps and services, making it a prime target for cybercriminals. Cloud breaches
cost organizations billions every year. Here are the key considerations for modern cloud
security:

● Avoid the compliance checkbox. Most security are compliance-minded as a risk that can
be easily controlled. But checking the compliance box does not mean that your Cloud
Security Posture Management (CSPM) tool is meeting your business’ needs or focused
on securing the holistic cloud environment.

● Maintain tight identity management and access controls. Your organization should
manage permissions and stay on top of all access to critical information. Only key
stakeholders who need access to a particular environment should have privileges. Sally
in accounting should not be able to access highly sensitive HR files. This limits what an
attacker can do, and the number of files that she or he can access. Be stingy with
access controls – especially those related to Privileged Access Management (PAM).

● Protect your data (in the cloud). Deploying a strategic data loss prevention strategy
helps to limit data breaches and protects cloud data from outside threats that can affect
compliance. This will also help reveal and prioritize which cloud data encryption needs
protecting.

● Know your CVEs (Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures). This open source, public list
of known vulnerabilities found in applications is available to any member of the public.
Each found vulnerability receives an ID and score based on its impact, type of attack
vector, and potential ramifications. This approach is only beneficial for known risks; not
those lurking in your organizations’ code. Second, relying on CVEs will generate A LOT
of alerts – which can lead to ignored alerts, skipped steps, or alert fatigue.

M.R.: Is security more difficult in the “hybrid cloud” environment, when dealing with
microservices, containers etc.? How should companies approach this?

Vladi: In today’s complex cloud environments, there’s a whole lot that can–and does–go wrong,
leading to suboptimal security. When an attacker looks at your environment, they are looking for
the easiest way inside.

The key to preventing cloud security risks and vulnerabilities is to understand the full context of
events and incidents. This context is what sets the scene and what determines the true
significance of issues. Context provides a full view into the circumstances that serve as the
background for all events and by which the events can be fully assessed.

With Lightspin’s graph-based algorithms and attack path prioritization, organizations can identify
all assets and relationships to effectively protect their cloud environment.

M.R. Rangaswami is the Co-Founder of Sandhill.com

A serial entrepreneur and former Visiting Partner at acclaimed startup accelerator Y Combinator, Rujul is deeply committed to using technology to solve complex business problems. Prior to Zip, Rujul co-founded FlightCar, where he served as CEO through the company’s acquisition by Mercedes Benz in 2016. He also served as a Product Manager for Airbnb.

M.R. Rangaswami: Can you please explain your journey of founding and scaling a fintech startup in just 18 months? What have been the challenges and the successes?

Rujul Zaparde: In previous roles, I experienced firsthand how frustrating it is for business users to navigate vague, complex financial processes inside their companies. It leaves people wondering not only how to begin business purchases, but also how to secure all of the necessary approvals to get what they need to properly do their jobs. My co-founder Lu and I launched Zip in 2020, the world’s first intake-to-procure software to solve this ubiquitous problem.

We provide an easy-to-use “concierge” experience for any employee to request a business-related purchase. Companies use our software to orchestrate any purchase through complex approval workflows with complete visibility for all stakeholders throughout the process. 

Starting Zip and scaling the company from fintech startup to fintech unicorn in just 18 months has been an amazing journey! We recently announced $43M in Series B funding at a $1.2 billion valuation. Our more than 100 customers include industry leaders like Canva, Snowflake, Roblox, Coinbase, Airtable, Toast, Webflow and Databricks. I believe one of the keys to our success is that unlike many other financial software applications on the market, we started with a consumer-focused lens so our business-class product genuinely appeals to end-users.

This has helped us grow quickly. One of the biggest challenges we faced has been cultivating company culture as a fresh team in a remote-first environment during the pandemic. We’re figuring out how to be the most successful we can be in a hybrid, but mostly remote, work environment. What’s worked well is going the extra mile to over-communicate, in particular between sales and engineering teams, to ensure that a remote workforce doesn’t get in the way of engineering having true empathy with customer pain.

M.R.: How has the SaaS explosion and decentralization of purchasing decisions impacted modern businesses? How will it continue to impact modern businesses in the future?

Rujul: More companies are increasingly buying new software as part of digital transformation initiatives. Accommodating remote and hybrid workforces has also accelerated the SaaS explosion, which really started over the course of the last decade prior to the pandemic. This is true for all businesses, whether they’re a small tech startup or a Fortune 500 company.

Given current economic turbulence, it’s more important than ever to have a clear vision of a company’s spending and procurement processes. However, this is more difficult now because many departments inside of companies have invested over the years in a wide array of SaaS products, many of them being point solutions that do not necessarily solve long-term problems. 

The SaaS explosion and immediate fixes to long-term issues combined with decentralized purchasing decisions have complicated and disaggregated the process of buying software and services. What once was the purview of IT and purchasing departments is now often dropped in the laps of line of business employees who are forced to spend significant time navigating outdated purchase order processes and complex vendor request approval workflows.

This leads to delays that hamper productivity and innovation. Current manual procurement workflow processes also create visibility challenges for finance and executive teams. Businesses need new solutions, now and in the future, to keep up with the rapid adoption of technology and services driven by digital transformation as purchasing decisions become increasingly decentralized and employees take on greater agency in the procurement process.

M.R.: What are the necessary steps needed to improve outdated procurement processes? What advice would you give to business and technology leaders looking to implement technology to solve the issues that have arisen with the SaaS explosion and decentralization of purchasing decisions?

Rujul: Legacy procurement tools and processes often only focus on procure-to-pay – from the point where a purchase order (PO) is generated to payment – without considering the challenge of initially requesting a purchase and getting the approvals required for generating a PO in the first place.

By contrast, an intake-to-procure approach, which is how Zip operates, provides an easy-to-adopt experience for employees to initiate any procurement request – no training required. Without Zip, typical procurement processes require 3-6 teams and disparate systems, 5+ hours of training just to know how to initiate a request, and 25+ emails. 

I advise companies to seriously consider investments in technology that automate manual processes and replace or supplement the legacy software that their employees dread using. If we expect people to be more productive and efficient we should be making people’s work lives simpler whenever possible. We owe it to the employees who are persistently trying to solve business challenges and innovate. Employees are being severely underserved, having to make business purchases through scattered, outdated processes. Implementing modern intake-to-procure technology provides a unified, long-lasting solution to the SaaS chaos every organization is experiencing.

M.R. Rangaswami, Co-Founder, Sandhill Group

The 2022 C.K. Prahalad Award was given to two co-winners, Shopify Sustainability Fund and Stripe Climate, recognizing their groundbreaking efforts to catalyze a market for carbon removal solutions.

The awards were announced in connection with the 2022 CEF Annual Leadership Retreat, attended by senior executives representing CEF member companies with combined revenues of $4 trillion.

Here is Yahoo Finance’s coverage of the news.

On Shopify

Shopify, a leading provider of essential internet infrastructure for commerce and one of the largest corporate buyers of long-term carbon removal, launched its Sustainability Fund in September 2019. The goal of the Fund is to assist companies that are proving, scaling, and commercializing climate technologies for massive impact in the long term.

CEF’s founder, MR Rangaswami, praised this strategy:

“The decision to purchase carbon removal at prices well above the minimum available price as a way to kickstart the demand and spur innovation showed real foresight and courage. Shopify is truly doubling down on long-term carbon removal and the forward-thinking entrepreneurs behind it.”

The goal is to accelerate the timeline to a low-cost carbon removal market, and they are well underway. As of March 2022, Shopify has committed 32 million dollars through its Fund to carbon removal purchases from 22 entrepreneurial, tech-driven companies. Upon signing, Shopify was the largest purchaser for 17 of them, and the very first purchaser for nine. Several have gone on to raise tens of millions of dollars of capital — and grown their carbon removal capacity and customer bases exponentially — on the basis of that crucial early support.

On Stripe

During the same timeframe, global payments leader Stripe started blazing its own trail to help drive carbon removal solutions. In August 2019, Stripe announced its Negative Emissions Commitment, pledging at least one million dollars per year to pay, at any price, for the direct removal and permanent storage of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

Stripe’s thesis was that early customers could help accelerate new technologies to market. By being early adopters of promising new carbon removal solutions that are small-scale and very expensive, Stripe could enable these technologies to scale more rapidly. Stripe worked with scientific experts to select carbon removal companies that store carbon permanently, don’t take up significant arable land, and have a path to being affordable at scale.

After the initial pledge, Stripe launched Stripe Climate – allowing any business on Stripe’s platform to direct a percentage of their revenue towards scaling carbon removal technologies. This program quickly became the world’s largest coalition of carbon removal buyers and today has more than 15,000 active users. At the end of 2021, Stripe had deployed $15 million in carbon removal purchases into 14 different companies and was the first customer for 11 of them.

CEF Chair P.J. Simmons underscored the importance of these developments, pointing to the 2022 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change:

“To reach our net zero climate goals, the IPCC says reducing emissions is not enough — we need to focus on removing existing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere with technologies that are science-based, verifiable, and scalable. Both Prahalad Award winners are accelerating momentum to do that, in ways that will help future-proof their businesses.”

Though Shopify and Stripe entered their carbon removal journeys separately, they quickly came to the same conclusion: that collective action would be more impactful than working alone.

In April of this year they co-founded Frontier, alongside Alphabet, Meta and McKinsey Sustainability, incorporating everything they’d learned since placing their first bets on carbon removal in 2019.

Frontier is an advance market commitment to put nearly a billion dollars on the table to buy carbon removal between now and 2030. The goal is to send researchers, entrepreneurs, and investors a strong demand signal that there is a future market for carbon removal.

On Corporate Eco Forum

CEF is an invitation-only network of leading executives from Fortune and Global 500 companies driving sustainability strategy and innovation worldwide. Members include Fortune and Global 500 companies from diverse industries with combined revenues of $4 trillion.

CEF provides a year-round safe, neutral space for influential executives to exchange best practice, collaborate, and innovate. The diversity of executives, coupled with the cross-industry nature of CEF, creates a world-class platform to accelerate sustainable business problem solving and innovation.

About The C.K. Prahalad Award For Global Business Sustainability Leadership

The C.K. Prahalad Award for Global Business Sustainability Leadership, created in 2010 to honor founding CEF Advisory Board member C.K. Prahalad, recognizes exceptional, globally significant private-sector action that exemplifies the fundamental connection between sustainability, innovation and long-term business success in a globalizing world

Article credit: Yahoo Finance

Following his role as research director and instructor of fintech at Creighton University, San Francisco-based economist, Jeffrey Milewski co-founded the non-profit Global Income Coin.

The crypto company aims to provide a universal basic income of $1 to any person worldwide. Initial funding of $2 million is from a personal donation of Sid Sijbrandij (co-founder and CEO of GitLab Inc.).

M.R. Rangaswami: Why did you co-found a nonprofit that wants to utilize crypto as a way to provide universal basic income worldwide? 

Jeffrey Milewski: I’m inspired by the potential of crypto to make a major positive impact in the world. Crypto is an exciting technology that has transformed the way we think about and actually use money. We think the timing is right to leverage it for a good cause. Over the years, blockchain technology has proven to be a trustworthy and a legitimate mechanism for value transfer.

More recent innovations have addressed issues of scalability. We are now able to develop a new monetary model using crypto that can be efficiently adopted worldwide as a form of useful money. The universal basic income aspect of our model is driven by our mission to use crypto for good. Specifically, we aim to reduce extreme poverty by giving $1 a day of income to everyone in the world. As a nonprofit, we want people to trust and support Global Income Coin as both an organization and a new currency.

M.R. How can nonprofits add value to the crypto ecosystem?

Jeffrey: Many people have a skeptical view of crypto because of its speculative nature and its association with ponzi-like schemes. There typically is some group of individuals that profit tremendously from the promotion of the new token. A nonprofit entity is in a much better position to avoid this negative association and draw in the crypto-skeptic population. We want to create greater trust in the crypto ecosystem by being a nonprofit that honestly incentivizes users to participate in our project. 

M.R.: Why should nonprofits consider crypto as part of their strategy?

Jeffrey: We are using crypto because it is inherently permissionless, which means we can introduce a new currency through a grassroots movement without depending on an incumbent party. This also means the crypto as a technology can accelerate financial inclusion in areas where incumbent parties haven’t served potential customers or even restricted access. 

M.R. Rangaswami is the Co-Founder of Sandhill.com

Bikram Gupta Sarma

There is a common saying that has been echoed by many CEOs that “it is lonely at the top”. In an interview in 2016, five years after taking over as CEO from Steve Jobs, Tim Cook clarified that the problems that leaders face is not loneliness, but isolation.

Technology CEOs experience this isolation in their roles as they go about their daily work.  All of them are extremely successful and got to this position because they were better than others, but do they still feel anxieties that they are isolated in their roles? 

There are common anxieties that I have witnessed working with technology leaders in my career both in technology companies and now as an executive and leadership coach. Many solutions and advises have been given to overcome these, however since technology itself changes rapidly, these anxieties get amplified, and the feeling continues to stay.

The 5 anxieties of a tech CEO

A technology CEO constantly faces these five anxieties or challenges. The first is dealing with increasing individual and team performance. Technology moves at such a rapid pace that it is difficult to keep up with evolving new concepts. The second is with doing more with less – either with resources (people and budgets) or time to meet the company goals. Most technology organizations have developed specializations over the years and the CEO experiences the third anxiety of leveraging with partner organizations as specializations are all over. Often, either the organization, the investors or the board has a new vision, and the CEO now needs to deal with a fourth anxiety of how to synchronize one’s execution with a new vision. Finally, the technology world has grown global and technology teams take the job to where the talent is. This now means managing and leading global workforce, the fifth anxiety. 

“Into the unknown” is a popular song from Disney’s movie – Frozen 2. The following lines from the song resonate with all these anxieties and challenges that a tech leader faces as they climb the corporate ladder.

Every day’s a little harder
As I feel my power grow
Don’t you know there’s part of me
That longs to go

More about these anxieties

Being a CEO in technology is a mixed blessing. One loves technology as it involves creation, design and execution of a new product. However, for customers to adopt a product, it is not just dependent on generating ideas of what is possible, but successful execution and delivery. As the leader starts to bring visions to reality, they start to encounter the various challenges and anxieties. Let us examine each in detail.

Anxiety 1: Increasing Performance

We all know technology moves at a fast pace. Technology companies pivot their technology strategy every 2 to 3 years due to rate of change. In this environment a CEO could be a hero today and not be the cool leader tomorrow. As they try to keep up with the new shiny object it causes great anxiety and challenges. 

A CEO who understands a few concepts in one and some or none in the other will have trouble if his team starts to think that he is a dinosaur. This causes anxieties like “Does the team respect me?” The leader is now challenged with continually increasing their personal performance. Where is the time to do this while running a company?

Anxiety 2: Doing more with less

As we know, technology is an evolving field. How does this translate to what one does and execution of regular programs and projects? Let us put ourselves in the shoes of a CEO. The leader has developed a state-of-the-art product or service using today’s technology. In a couple of years, this technology will be obsolete. In two to three years, the company will need to build another product or service using the prevalent technology of that time. But they will also need to sustain the existing technology due to customers who may not be ready to switch to a new paradigm or may have users who use that. The CEO now needs to manage two streams – one sustaining and one innovating. This is the innovative leader’s dilemma. The investors are not ready to invest in the sustaining technology as it will not bring any new customers. This will plateau the company as opposed to the growth plan that was agreed on with investors and communicated to the employees. The CEO now needs to deliver more with almost the same or lessor amount of investment.

Another dimension of this challenge is that employees move onto other technologies as they want to stay ahead of new things. This implies that the sustaining team get smaller. Investors decide that there is no business growth in this area, so this magically becomes the budget for next year.

In both cases, the CEO is now challenged to do more with less – either with budgets or people resources. 

Anxiety 3: Partner management

As technology evolved, it also continued to specialize. A great example is of banking software. 25 years ago, almost all banking data was in mainframe computers. If one needed a statement, one went to a bank’s branch which would print out the statement. Around this time, personal computers and internet started to emerge, and banking technologists built software to allow access using web connection technologies. Soon smart mobile phones and tablets emerged, and our data was accessible as applications (Apps) on these devices. Just this use case alone has five specializations in a broad category. In addition, each has sub specializations in user interface, data management, device and data security, data integration, etc.

In the example above, let us assume that the technology CEO needs to provide a complete solution to a customer. The CEO’s company has a piece of the puzzle that will help form the bigger picture. How does the CEO now find the other pieces and effectively partner with other companies to provide a complete solution to the customer? 

Anxiety 4: Change in vision

There can be two reasons of vision change. First is in the direction of the company and second is change in a board or investors. 

The company’s new vision needs change in skills, and the existing teams could become redundant all together. This is the cause of the first type of anxiety that CEO face due to vision change.

The second is when the composition of the board or the investors changes and they want the company to go a different way than what the CEO would like or envisages.

This is a conundrum that the CEO faces while they would like to stay with the original goal. 

Anxiety 5: Effective Global workforce

This has been a competency in some industries like manufacturing, however it is a different kind of challenge for technology CEOs. I have written an article on this topic entitled ‘The world is potholed’. The tech CEO is posed with cultural issues, gauging productivity, managing multiple time zones, establishing local leadership, management of global workforce, project portfolio distribution, resource and skill availability, juggling budgets, and various administrative challenges. These can easily overwhelm a CEO in addition to the other anxieties that they already have.

Getting to Successful outcomes

I first came across the term thinking partner in a book by Marcia Reynolds. This was an ‘aha’ moment for me. Somewhere in my mid-career, I was fortunate to have an executive coach who was my thinking partner when similar anxieties and challenges started. 

A technology CEO is the one who understands their organization and its behaviors the best. A ‘trusted advisor, executive coach and thinking partner’ works with the successful CEO – leader to make them even more successful. In his book, Marshall Goldsmith, the world’s #1 leadership coach talks about 20 habits that hold leaders back. 

A thinking partner helps engage in a productive dialog in a safe environment to remove anxieties and discuss these habits. The executive coach provides a confidential environment for thoughts and ideas and helps examine them. The trusted advisor discusses prizes (pros) for doing or not doing something, and punishment (cons) for doing or not doing something. This approach leads to successful outcomes.

Outcome 1: Impactful leadership

Technology CEOs continue to get better in their areas using a structured process so that their leadership has a major impact. This works both for a CEO who has been in a role for a time and when these anxieties emerge, or someone who recently got into this new role and is suddenly faced with questions like “how much is my work is related to technology and how much is leading the extended leadership team?”

Outcome 2: Business direction

Most CEOs start out in technology with either a skill or knowledge in a particular area as an individual contributor. Soon technology leadership takes them into roles of managing and leading successful teams. They need to balance the direction their company’s business is going, even as the excitement of the technology stays. CEOs need to escape the present trap.

Outcome 3: Successful Global teams

Creating, managing and leading global teams is not an easy task. The CEO needs to find the right person who understands the strategy then establish these teams and investigate models that work. CEOs know their organizations best and team dynamics could negatively or positively impact the outcome.

Outcome 4: Solve Conundrums

A lot of decisions made by tech CEOs is impacted by knowledge, assumptions and beliefs. Another decision factor is determined by the consequences the leader fears. A thinking partner helps the leader understand, analyze and look at them objectively to get to an informed decision.  

Outcome 5: Streamline workflows

Leaders could possibly streamline plans if they think about the workflows that they want to create. A thinking partner expands awareness of all these outcomes.

Figure 2: Transformation of the Technology CEO to move forward and leaving anxieties behind

The author Bikram Gupta Sarma is a Principal at IBTA GLOBAL. He pivoted from being a Technology Leader to an Advisor, Thinking partner and Executive Coach. He has over three and a half decades of experience, from building startups to mid-sized businesses to working in a large Fortune 100 company. He has held executive leadership positions in software engineering, product management and engineering operations working with customers across multiple disciplines. Bikram drove and managed platform and systems engineering at Oracle as Vice President for multiple products. He also worked in a General Management role of Global Operations leading teams in 6 countries across multiple business units. 

Recently, as technology continues to evolve, Bikram helped create cloud based systems and transform business models from traditional software licensing to recurring revenue subscriptions. He also managed engineering teams developing for embedded, Internet of Things (IoT) and Data Integration solutions. 

Gaurav Bhasin, Managing Director, Allied Advisers

Inflation has surged in the US economy in recent months at 8.5% to its highest level in 40 years and impacted the business environment across practically every industry. Public and Private technology companies in particular have seen their valuations impacted.

Allied Advisers developed this article to provide insights into how inflation impacts technology company valuations and what business executives can do to navigate this choppy environment and suggestions to sustain growth momentum and earnings despite the inflation headwinds.

The inflation rate in the United States has swung from less than 1% during the peak of the Pandemic to 8.5% currently, the highest since 1981.

As a consumer, you have felt the bite of inflation while filling your car with gas unless you drive a Tesla! Inflation has also taken a bite out of technology stocks. It is not a coincidence that technology stocks have taken a severe fall during the recent rapid rise of inflation. There are very specific reasons why technology stocks decline during high inflationary periods.

Here are four reasons inflation erodes a technology company’s value:

1. Increase in borrowing costs: Variable rate debt on company books becomes more expensive as interest rates rise with inflation, reducing net income. However, debt could still be a cheaper financing option compared to equity.
   
   
2. Increase in supply chain costs: the rising prices of components and logistics have a deleterious impact on production economics at technology companies. For example, semiconductor chip shortages and resulting price escalations have substantially increased cost of goods for companies like Apple (-11%) Microsoft (-18%) and Roku (-58%)
   
   
3. Increase in labor costs: inflation causes companies to increase employee wages to retain talent, especially in hotly contested areas like R&D, sales and engineering, resulting in an increase in cost of sales (resulting in lower gross margins) and operating expenses (resulting in lower operating profits). Wage inflation creates headwinds to high growth technology companies that rely on not just retaining but also growing headcount in critical areas to drive revenue acceleration.
   
   
4. Increase in G&A costs: “keep the lights on” expenses like rent (though hybrid work due to COVID has helped reduce rent), utilities and insurance escalate in an inflationary environment, chipping away at cash and profitability
   

As inflation causes nominal interest rates to rise with monetary tightening, the present value of those future cash flows decreases since the discount rate (or the cost of capital) has increased. The
markets are always forward-looking, so software companies that derived most of their value from future growth have suffered the greatest declines in market price.

For a further insights on inflation and details on NASDAQ’s Composite Index vs. US Treasury Note Yield (1-Year) – click here for Allied Advisor’s full article.

The SEG SaaS Index is a list of publicly traded companies that they have determined to be SaaS businesses (i.e., they primarily offer solutions via the cloud and may have a subscription or transaction-based pricing model).

In 1Q22 the median growth rate for the SEG SaaS Index reached 28.5%, with nearly a third of SaaS companies experiencing a growth rate of 40% or more. Note: this upward trend is also a result of more high-growth companies added to the Index.

Here are five highlight updates from the 2022 Q1 Report.

I) Due to the large influx of companies taking advantage of strong stock market performance in 2021, there were 14 additions to the SEG SaaS Index in 1Q22. Notable additions include Couchbase, Squarespace, PowerSchool, Instructure, Riskified, Alkami, and Monday.com.

II) EV/Revenue multiples dropped significantly in 1Q22, down 30% from 13.9x in 4Q21 to 9.8x in 1Q22. This material decline over the last four months has occurred as investors shy away from riskier, high growth investments and focus more on profitability instead. Geopolitical unrest, inflation, interest rates, and federal monetary policy have all contributed to this shift.

III) Security and human capital management had the highest revenue growth in 1Q22 as employee retention, labor shortages, hybrid work environments, and increased attention on cybersecurity solutions brought these product categories into focus.

IV) Communications & Collaboration had the highest TTM revenue growth rate out of all product categories, with a median growth of 41.5%. Leaders in the space included Monday.com at 91.3%, Asana at 66.7%, and Twilio at 61.3%. This category was followed closely by Other SaaS and Security, with median growth rates of 35.2% and 33.3%, respectively.

V) The Weighted Rule of 40%: Generally, SaaS companies with a higher weighted Rule of 40(1) are rewarded with higher revenue multiples. In 1Q22, companies in the higher cohorts saw the most significant impact on multiples. We see this impact as a result of investors shifting toward profitability since these cohorts include many companies growing quickly but are unprofitable.

Click here for the full SEG 1Q22 SaaS Public Market Update.

“It’s finding talent that’s the problem.” Sound familiar? The past two years have accelerated the job demands that were already presenting themselves in Traditional IT and Digital IT workforce.

What Ravature has leveraged is their “Talent as a Service” or TaaS.

CEO, Ashwin Bharath and his teams are finding, hiring, and developing technology talent for an organization’s specific requirements so talent can be successful contributors from day one.

Training over 19,000 software engineers in 55 technical disciplines and deploying them to blue-chip companies throughout the world, Ashwin had some inspiring perspectives on the tech hiring landscape and the opportunities available in the wake of COVID-19.

M.R. Rangaswami: Tell me a little about the tech talent landscape and why there is an opportunity for disruption?

Ashwin Bharath: This left the supply-side hiring constituents such as large enterprises and systems integrators scrambling for cover with an unprecedented wave of challenges. The talent supply ecosystem which had relied in the past on sourcing from staffing firms supplemented by training firms (primarily instructor and online learning) as well as the ones offering coding boot camps have fallen woefully short in addressing the magnitude of this challenge.

M.R: So, the reliance on staffing and training firms coupled with the shift to broad platforms left a huge opportunity for disruption or a new approach. Is this where your “Talent as a Service” model was born?

Ashwin: In short yes. The strength of a company is not on its power or size, but based on how quick they can pivot, react, and respond to market demands. Any CTO will tell you that technology provides that agility. So, growth and agility rely heavily on technology, but the company’s existing tech teams are ill-prepared to take on this demand. It is this heavy demand that is forcing companies to realize that it is impossible to solve their tech woes by themselves. That is why companies come to Revature, we understand this challenge better than anyone else and we help create a unique solution built just for them.

M.R.: What is that approach? What is Revature’s secret sauce?

Ashwin: We start by considering two factors:

1. First thing we do is to unbundle the current talent solutions that are in place. As we unbundle, we help the client realize that they must focus on solving both the Talent Acquisition and Talent Transformation problems. This process helps the client understand that attacking both Talent Acquisition and Talent Transformation is what is needed to solve their tech staffing challenges. Bottom line: we help the client to understand the value of hiring based on talent and not on skills.

2. Next, we emphasize the need to democratize opportunities. Democratizing means that we need to build a Talent Enablement Ecosystem or Talent as a Service – which we define as a self-sustaining habitat that allows the client to tap into a consistent talent development cycle. This TaaS gives our clients a plug and play participation model irrespective of size and scale.

M.R.: I heard you say “Don’t Hire for Skill, Hire for Talent” can you unpack that a bit?

Ashwin: Well, this is really the “secret sauce” that you mentioned before. At Revature, we believe that the real problem with tech hiring is not a skill gap but an opportunity gap. “Skill” in technology changes at the speed of light and where most organizations get into trouble is that they hire based on skillset. That approach is basically just kicking the can down the road and leaves you vulnerable in the future.

Revature thinks about the problem differently, while traditional hiring focuses on the “skill gap” issue. We focus on opportunity creation and diversity. The idea that there is a lack of talent is not true, there is plenty of talent out there, but the traditional hiring approaches are too focused on skillset to take advantage of it.

Considering these facts, the Fed Reserve Bank of NY states that 40% of recent graduates are underemployed and over 50 million Americans are stuck in low wage jobs, without any prospect of acquiring skills that will get them better jobs.

The quantity of potential talent included in these group are staggering, tapping into these groups is one of the answers to the supply problem. And that is the advantage of working with us at Revature, our Hire, Train, Deploy model hires for talent and delivers the skill. Revature hires based on the potential of a candidate, not on their current skills. In other words, we don’t find talent, we create it.

M.R. Rangaswami is the Co-Founder Sandhill.com

Siddharth “Sid” Lunawat is CEO and co-founder of Hammoq Inc., a company that automates the ecommerce process for returned item resale and used goods. In the face of an exploding market for overstocked, returned and used goods, where the fashion resale market alone is expected to reach $26 billion in 2022, Hammoq is reimaging “recommerce.”

By using artificial intelligence and machine learning to close the labor gap challenge, Hammoq is overcoming industry barriers which have traditionally limited the product identification, valuation and marketplace listing process.

M.R. Rangaswami: What is recommerce and how is it changing the landscape of today’s retail and ecommerce industries? 

Sid Lunawat: Recommerce is the sale of used and returned goods. This includes everything from clothing to electronics, toys and much more. The industry is supported with a tremendous glut of online retail returns. In fact, retail returns topped $761 billion in 2021. This is further accelerated by a high demand for sustainable fashion upcycling and vintage items as consumers, particularly GenZ and Millenials, increasingly make green and sustainable product choices.

Conventional retailers are also starting to shift to a recommerce model to monetize the high volume of product returns that cannot be resold as new. The retail industry has sustained more than $309 billion in return losses and seeks better methods to recoup revenue from their returned item inventory.

While there is an abundance of products as well as resale marketplaces to support this recommerce economy, the challenge is in the labor required to identify product value and push it to the marketplaces where used goods are sold. This is a mounting challenge across the industry from resellers and liquidators to thrifters and retailers. At Hammoq, we are reimagining this recommerce process using artificial intelligence and machine learning, matched with virtual assistants, to automate the online listing process so retailers and resellers alike can sell more and build thriving recommerce businesses.

M.R.: Why is AI a key enabler of recommerce? Why can’t this new retailing trend happen without AI technology?

Sid: Used clothing comes from two main sources – donations or returns. In both scenarios they are dropped in a bin that is then sent to a warehouse. They generally have no tags and because the items are used, the retail price no longer holds. AI can quickly identify the item and its resale price in a way that used to be a purely manual effort. Traditionally, expensive human intervention was required to identify product attributes, assign product value and create the listing that is required to place the product in a marketplace for sale. This high labor cost has prevented the industry from scaling up rapidly.  

At Hammoq, we’re overcoming this obstacle with AI-powered machine vision technology. Using machine vision, sellers can quickly and accurately categorize an item. AI automates the product’s description of the color, style, pricing and other attributes needed to accurately list the product for sale. The result is enabling resellers to scale and sell more products, faster.

M.R.: What is the future of recommerce and how will it change the retail supply chain? 

Sid: As the recommerce industry grows the stress it puts on the supply chain becomes even greater. Without AI and machine learning technology, supply chain costs will dramatically rise and more products will go wasted in landfills. This also prevents retailers from capitalizing on the demand for increased sustainability and product recycling.

With AI, Hammoq is changing this trajectory by injecting a new, scalable process to more rapidly place returned items back into the retail supply chain. We are helping to increase the volume and profitability of products and shave down the billions of dollars in failed replacement of returned items. Through the use of automation, processing costs per item will drop and retailers can sustain profitability on higher value items, repurposing them more easily vs. liquidating them for pennies on the dollar.  

M.R. Rangaswami is the Co-Founder of Sandhill.com

As the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in January sparked a new wave of autonomous vehicles (AVs) coming to the automotive market in the next few years, much focus as of…

In a time where many companies have had to rapidly embrace new ways to work from anywhere – from remote and home offices to in the office and on the road, Nerdio has helped to more securely and efficiently deliver user workspaces from the cloud. 

Working remote isn’t new for Co-Founder Vadim, or his team at Nerdio. In fact, the company has a fully remote workforce with employees around the world putting its technology to work internally just as its customers do.

Today, Nerdio has more than two million users across its product portfolio, to easily deploy Azure Virtual Desktop and Windows 365. Nerdio Manager for MSP and Nerdio Manager for Enterprise add significant features and functionality on top of Microsoft’s virtual desktop services, Azure Virtual Desktop and Windows 365, to support faster virtual desktop deployments and more simplified management to lighten the load on IT administrators. 

M.R. Rangaswami: The pandemic caused many companies to quickly re-evaluate their end-user computing strategy and employ technologies, like virtual desktops and desktop-as-a-service or DaaS, to enable employees to work from home. But now that workers are slowing going back to the office, will DaaS still be a growing trend?

Vadim Vladimirskiy: COVID-19 rapidly transformed the way we work, and think about work. Nearly overnight, employees who had never worked remotely or from home were required to do so. This has had a long-term impact on our work cultures and cultural approaches to work. Even as pandemic restrictions are being lifted, digital workers are reluctant to go back to the office.

Pew Research Center reports that two years into the pandemic 61% of workers that have a workplace outside of their home choose not to go into their workplace often citing an increase in work/life balance. Yet others still prefer to go into the office, or have the option of a hybrid workplace, so it’s the need for flexibility of work that remains constant. 

All this is to say, the end user computing technology we use to keep employees productive must support every way people want to work. In the office, remote and a hybrid of both. This is the ultimate value of DaaS technology – it gives users a familiar and accessible workspace from anywhere they want to work. DaaS, particularly virtual desktops that are delivered from Microsoft Azure, will also lower operating costs, enhance security, improve business continuity and simplify management of end user computing. 

These benefits far outweigh the traditional cost of end user computing where the management of physical devices can be pricey and riddled with needless overhead. DaaS was already a trending technology to improve the productivity and security of end users. The pandemic simply accelerated it.

M.R. Rangaswami: What are some of the challenges DaaS technology can help IT solve? 

Vadim: Supporting the remote worker isn’t the only value of DaaS technology – even though the improved accessibility to business apps and data is the benefit many think of first. Security, lower operating costs and improved business continuity are all additional values of a DaaS computing approach.  

We all know the endpoint is an enduring problem when it comes to security vulnerabilities. End users are often not prepared or educated appropriately when it comes to spotting socially engineered or phishing attacks that can increase the threat surface and provide cybercriminals an entry point into the corporate network. DaaS is the ideal solution to this security risk. Because data lives securely in infrastructure that can be better secured, protected and controlled by IT, it isn’t put at risk by the user. Added encryption and multi-factor authentication further removes security risk. 

DaaS also can dramatically lower both capital and operating costs. Physical devices and clients no longer need to be as robust to operate cloud workspaces, so hardware costs are reduced and extended. Management is also much easier and can be done remotely from a central console, lowering staff and resource burdens.

Finally, when leveraging a public cloud such as Microsoft Azure, infrastructure costs and even space, power and cooling requirements of a traditional on-prem data center can be avoided, while scale can be swiftly enabled regardless of location. 

Further, DaaS increases business resilience and continuity. Leveraging the cloud, enterprises achieve a much greater uptime level, drawing from the high-grade public cloud infrastructure. DaaS access to business data and apps is virtually immune to weather, disaster or even ransomware-related disasters which can often cripple the more traditional local-device based approach to end user computing. 

M.R.: What will it take to make DaaS part of the new common fabric of enterprise IT? 

Vadim: DaaS is already becoming a regular component of many organizations – both large and small. It will only be a matter of time before it is the de facto standard for enterprise end user computing based on the advantages outlined earlier. As the new hybrid work world continues to persist – and all indicators show that it will – IT will continue to seek ways to improve employee productivity, secure business data, and improve business continuity all while lowering capital and operating costs. DaaS is a clear solution to achieve each of these and will in time become a vital component of every enterprise environment. 

M.R. Rangaswami is the Co-Founder of Sandhill.com

Rashida Salahuddin, President & CEO, The Corporate Citizenship Project The need for more corporate responsibility has evolved for today’s corporations and the next generation of business leaders in the form…

By Dr. Canming Jiang is founder and CEO of Datawiza

A CEO recently told me his company can’t take their solution upmarket without the stronger authentication and single sign-on (SSO) capabilities that Fortune 500 companies need.

Adapting to the wide array of new identity platforms and tools that customers are requesting, he explained, requires too much precious developer time, risking a slower pace of innovation and forcing
uncomfortable conversations about pricing models that the market may consider exploitive. (Check
out the SSO Wall of Shame, a list of vendors that one GitHub member believes are overcharging for
SSO capabilities.)

I challenged the CEO that he needs to be three steps ahead of customers. Just as no one would
think of building an HTTP website today when HTTPS is standard, he needs to deliver Burger King-
style “have it your way” SSO and other access and provisioning capabilities now because these are
going to be table steaks before long.

Login freedom is a must.

Let’s back up a bit. Security risks abound, so implementing the security your customers need can’t be
an option, even if they’re not explicitly asking for it today. One thing automotive CEOs Elon Musk
and James Farley agree on: Powerful, responsive automotive braking systems are not optional. I
believe that we are at this same place now with respect to SSO, and we will be there sooner than
you think with tomorrow’s security protocols.

Companies are adopting any number of modern identity platforms –such as Okta, Azure AD and
Google – to increase security, enable SSO and multi-factor authentication (MFA), offer better and
more productive user experiences and provide visibility into user activity. The complexity of
optimizing SaaS software to run in any cloud, and support any IAM platform has opened the door to
what I believe borders predatory pricing. Customers should not have to pay double or even triple the
standard price for B2B SSO integration because the market has not settled on one IAM winner yet,
and it’s too costly to incrementally support what individual customers are using.

Breaches are unfortunately all too common. So whether your customer is a manufacturer, school
district or government agency, they either have – or will soon have – a tool to identify and set access
privileges for employees, partners, and customers. From the perspective of your sales team,
supporting all possible SSO options today is a dream. Doing so is one less detail that can knock your
solution out of the qualification process. I would go so far as to say that it should be part of any
minimum viable solution.

However, the challenge doesn’t stop at SSO. Companies are constantly looking for new ways to
make it easier and safer for users and customers to access applications, which may involve a mix of
strategies. The latest trend is social logins.

Zoom is a great example of this, and it’s becoming a must-have feature of B2B applications. As a vendor, you don’t have a crystal ball to see what’s next
– and the last thing you want to do is sink costs into constantly responding to the latest access
management strategy.

But then again, can you afford not to if your competitors are doing it?

The cost and pricing predicament.

One rosy way to get around the challenge of evolving login strategies is to charge premium fees for
SSO and whatever comes next. Mature SaaS vendors can better afford the development costs –
including headcount for a couple of extra security experts. And many larger enterprises are more
than willing to pay those premium fees because verifying access is essential for security and tools
like SSO deliver a more acceptable user experience.

It’s a legitimate approach, but how long until this falls out of favor? Are you pricing yourself out of
customers who don’t want to pay the SSO tax? Will hiring development and security resources cut
into your already razor-thin margins?

Is “have-it-your-way” SSO a realistic mantra?

What is not supporting a range of SSO options costing you? The flip side of that coin is how much
does it really cost to support each identity platform? Clearly some vendors on the SSO Wall of
Shame are price gouging, while others are passing on legitimate costs.

The CEO and others I’ve talked to told me it takes several months to integrate the first identity
platform, and it can still take a month or more to integrate each additional platform even after the
team is experienced. (SDKs and APIs from IAM platforms are not as magical as some of us would
like to believe.) And then there is the cycle of constant maintenance and fixes. This is a huge cost
and an endless distraction for developers who should be focused on the critical product roadmap.
These costs can be passed on in some way to customers. In my view, the market should decide
SSO pricing and vendors that can justify charging exorbitant premium fees for SSO have every right
to do so.

But innovation doesn’t always come from those with the deepest pockets, and not every SaaS
vendor can throw more bodies at “have-it-your-way SSO,” providing the capability for free or for a
minimal additional fee. There are always tradeoffs, but as an industry, we need to think about
whether trading off our own software innovation for something that will soon be table stakes is good
for our customers.

The key to driving SSO-for-all is adopting an innovative no-code strategy that eliminates the need for
one-off development, enabling support for any identity platform with just a few clicks and all the
required security already built-in. Ideally, wouldn’t it be great if your customer support team could
enable the SSO flavor your customer needs, leaving developers to work on the next big thing?

The world is going no-code for a reason. Business users, accustomed to the simplicity of consumer-
based SaaS applications will no longer tolerate cumbersome Stone Age enterprise software. No-
code platforms are the key to delivering modern applications faster. Who hasn’t heard of Webflow,
Squarespace or Shopify for DIY website building tools? And tools abound for other development
areas, such as mobile apps and online courses.

To continue leading our markets, B2B SaaS vendors must support every possible login strategy that
customers want – username/password, SSO, social login, passwordless, and any other secure and
user-friendly strategy that comes along. Think of it as comprehensive connectivity for your
customers. Gartner has a name for this market: Customer Identity and Access Management (CIAM).
It’s where the industry is going.

Dr. Canming Jiang is founder and CEO of Datawiza

We are all alarmed by the situation in Ukraine and while our geographic distance may be far, we are determined to keep our support for Ukrainian people, close. To support this…

As co-founder and CEO of Rhino Health, Dr. Ittai Dayan is transforming the way healthcare AI solutions are created, adopted and measured. The Rhino Health Platform provides access to a large, distributed dataset from a diverse group of patients, powering models that deliver consistent results and, ultimately, improve health outcomes for large populations of patients.

Drawing on his background as a clinician and researcher, Ittai is passionate about creating equitable access to advanced AI-based diagnostics and treatment pathways – across increasingly diverse patient populations.

He led the world’s largest and most prominent study, utilizing federated learning (FL), published in Nature Medicine, the world’s largest and most prominent study, utilizing federated learning (FL). The EXAM study brought more than 20 healthcare institutions together, to train a healthcare AI solution on diverse data across institutions.

M.R. Rangaswami: What is Federated Learning (FL) and how is it improving healthcare and specifically precision medicine?

Dr. Ittai Dayan: FL is a machine learning paradigm that allows data scientists to train algorithms without exchanging underlying data. Rather than pooling data from multiple institutions into a central repository, federated learning involves training an algorithm on different ‘pools’ of data, blending only model weights, so that no patient data ever needs to leave a hospital’s firewall.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) for healthcare and lifesciences is well suited to FL, because it relies on patient data, which is highly sensitive, its usage is tightly regulated, and full anonymization of it can be difficult or impractical.

Without methods like FL, healthcare AI will only be trained on limited sets of patient data, decreasing the volume and diversity of patient data required to truly identify precision medicine. Precision medicine relies on algorithmic approaches, including AI, but requires that ‘models’ are trained on diverse data. This is especially an issue for rare diseases, or novel data modalities that are very ‘patchy’ and require accessing data from multiple providers. FL can help accelerate healthcare AI for the purposes of precision medicine.

M.R.: Coming from the healthcare field, was there any personal experience that brought you to found Rhino Health? What were the unmet needs you saw in the healthcare industry?

Ittai: As a clinician, I saw firsthand the amount of data that was generated by every patient interaction and how much of that was not accessible to be used for benefiting clinical care. While I was leading the development and deployment of AI models at Mass General Brigham, I oversaw many projects related to healthcare AI, many of which required access to diverse data to ensure robust model performance. To improve performance of a COVID-19 prognostication model, I led the EXAM study, published in Nature Medicine, which is probably the world’s largest and most prominent study to-date utilizing FL to train a healthcare AI solution on diverse data across institutions.

The understanding that FL can help break barriers to collaboration on data distributed all over the globe was eye-opening to me. Until then, it was considered too ‘sciency’ for the ‘real world.’  Rhino Health has proved that it is ready for prime time. We are turning this concept into a platform that would serve developers, clinicians and patients.

M.R.: What is the future of healthcare and precision medicine?

Ittai: The future of healthcare AI and precision medicine requires ongoing access to massive amounts of patient-derived biologic data and performing models that use that detailed data to predict diagnoses, aid in clinical decision making and predict outcomes, all in order to drive better care with better diagnostics, biomarkers and drugs that will be an improvement from the current standard of care. Federated learning will drive the future of healthcare, since it will be able to access sensitive patient data privacy in a secure and anonymized way.

M.R. Rangaswami is the Co-Founder of Sandhill.com

Before IntelePeer, Frank Fawzi worked at AT&T Bell Laboratories as the lead data communications architect for a $1.4B winning bid to the IRS. Later, he would found CommTech, eventually selling it to ADC, a leading provider of broadband solutions for the telecommunications industry, for $178 million.

Frank received a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science and a Master of Science in Management from Stevens Institute of Technology and participated in the Wharton Executive Management Program at the University of Pennsylvania. He was also selected as a QuantumShift’s Top Entrepreneurs in America for 2017 by KPMG’s Private Markets Group and the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business.

As the President and Chief Executive Officer at IntelePeer, Frank has been a driving force behind its growth and achieving its mission to become a dominant CPaaS provider for enterprises.

M.R. Rangaswami: How do you see customer experience evolving in this post-pandemic era? What is IntelePeer doing to get prepared?

Frank Fawzi: Primarily, during COVID, consumers moved from physical to digital interactions with businesses. And, as a result, have now learned the convenience and speed of digital interactions with a business instead of having to physically be present. As a result, companies have had to significantly increase their digital operations while maintaining the same level of personalization that a physical interaction allowed for.

And because call centers and offices were empty across the county, businesses had to pivot to a work-from-home or hybrid business model and needed to quickly find ways to continue answering customer queries while keeping both staff and customers informed about crucial business updates. 

During COVID, IntelePeer leaped forward to help our customers deliver that digital customer engagement through automation, virtual agents, communication AI and chatbots. These solutions were so effective they produced both a high ROI and an improvement in customer experience at scale, and today, consumers have come to expect 24/7 availability, self-service options and seller-free experiences. In addition, consumers continue to rely on automated self-serve or interacting with a virtual agent if it means spending less time on hold. 

At IntelePeer, we empower our customers with Atmosphere CPaaS, which streamlines customer interactions and engagement, allowing our clients to optimize staffing and deliver a variety of communication channels for a best-in-class customer experience (CX). Plus, by incorporating CPaaS and communications workflow automation into their cloud transition, our customers can free themselves from legacy platforms to provide personalized automation for enhanced CX.

MR: Are no-code/low-code applications the future? What advantages does such a solution give to companies that might not have a dedicated development team? 

Frank: While there is debate as to whether coding and software development will become obsolete in the future due to advanced machines, for now, no-code/low-code applications make the lives of businesses with limited development resources or busy developers much easier. IntelePeer’s Atmosphere Marketplace platform offers a suite of pre-built applications that allow non-technical and technically adept people to solve business communication needs within a matter of minutes. 

By eliminating drawn-out and costly development cycles, our no-code/low-code offering democratizes access to the latest communications, AI and analytics technologies that helps organizations of all sizes achieve outcomes that were once reserved only for large corporations with huge budgets. With a step-by-step and plug-and-play setup, our clients can solve their communication needs cost-effectively and rapidly. And with snap-in apps, they can integrate seamlessly with their current workflows, CRM, database, billing systems, or any other system that supports APIs. 

From easily tailoring voice-enabled BOTs, intelligent routing, and setting up post-call surveys to effortlessly capture customer feedback and smoothly configuring auto-response messages, these no-code and low-code applications modernize the consumer’s communication experience. Additionally, no company’s communication strategy is safe from having its numbers get mislabeled as spam or fraud by third-party regulators. Through IntelePeer’s Reputation Management solutions, businesses can remediate mismarked numbers before significant negative impact.

MR: How have virtual assistants, chatbots and other AI solutions transformed the customer experience/ journey?

Frank: Tremendously and more advances will be delivered to fully automate customer engagement and experience. The days of massive call centers with obscene hold times are numbered and will be replaced by communication workflow automation with virtual assistants, chatbots, AI and other tools.  

We now see that consumers prefer to try out self-service options before speaking with a human agent – most likely, the increased accuracy of virtual assistants, chatbots, and conversational AI solutions have given people greater confidence in solving problems on their own. However, because research shows that most customers consider their experience with an organization to be just as important as its products or services, it is paramount that those AI solutions be effective useful and comprehensive.  

Virtual agents and chatbots have elevated the customer journey by delivering more human interactions via sentiment and tonality analysis, language detection and translation, and speech-to-text and text-to-speech capabilities. With IntelePeer’s Atmosphere SmartFlows, customers can still escalate to a live agent based on the complexity of their inquiry for the most personalized CX possible. With SmartFlows, every call or communication interaction is recorded, transcribed and available to be searched and analyzed to continue looking for opportunities to improve the customer experience in the future.

Likewise, the customer journey is becoming more complicated, as people use an average of ten channels to communicate with companies today. IntelePeer’s easily configurable and ready-to-use AI solutions help our clients meet their customers on the channels they prefer, be that SMS, voice, web, email, digital or social channels. And through actionable insights on consumers’ preferences, attitudes, and purchase behaviors, businesses can provide precise recommendations and tailored experiences. 

M.R. Rangaswami is the Co-Founder of Sandhill.com 

Bobby founded Exterro with the conviction that the legal industry was rife with opportunities for process improvements that could be driven from lessons learned in other industries.

Today, Bobby fulfills Exterro’s founding principles by leading the company in building a comprehensive platform for global corporations and governmental agencies to mitigate risks, control costs, and have complete end to end visibility into their legal governance, risk and compliance processes.

M.R. Rangaswami: What are the key challenges facing corporate General Counsel or Chief Legal Officers that’s driving them to consider Exterro solutions?

Bobby Balachandran: The role of the GC or CLO has greatly evolved and expanded over the past 10-15 years due to a number of macro trends. First is the constant introduction of new laws and regulations to which an organization must comply. Significant among these over the past seven to eight years has been related to the increased scrutiny on privacy with laws such as the GDPR in Europe, or the various state laws like the CPRA in California here in the United States. Third is the relentless threat of cyber-attack or breach, and the fourth is the rise of legal operations, due to a sharp focus from the C-Suite on improving the efficiency and productivity of the legal department.

All of these greater trends have combined to create new business challenges that no longer can be addressed by a single organizational department, like Privacy, Compliance, Legal Operations, Security etc.

Let me give you an example:

Laws like the GDPR or CPRA allow an individual to request to know what data you have stored on them, how you’re using it, how long you plan to store it and even ask that you delete it. If the requester is a current or former employee, not only do you need to ensure you have the workflow to ensure the request is handled by the appropriate group, but the person or group responsible for the data must be able to quickly locate it, collect it, review it, redact any personal information not related to the requester and then securely deliver this information to the requestor.

You can see how this request quickly crosses conventional divisions and responsibilities—it’s not just someone in your Privacy department’s responsibility – he or she will need to work with someone with expertise in e-discovery at a minimum. And if that data subject submits a request for data deletion, things get even more complex, because before deleting anything, you must first confirm that the information can legally be deleted. It can’t be subject to retention requirements imposed by regulatory compliance obligations or a legal hold.

As a result, you have solid or very strongly dotted reporting lines for privacy, compliance, legal operations, litigation support and even incident response into the GC/CLO. And this is forcing a new way to think about both how to organize across these different areas for optimal performance, but also how to apply technology to solve some pretty challenging business processes.

M.R. So how should a GC or CLO think about solving these challenges?

Bobby: We strongly believe it all starts with data. All of us have heard that data is the “new oil” and while it might sound trite, there is truth to the statement. How organizations collect, store, use, manage, protect and ultimately delete data largely determines how successful they can be.
But it’s not easy. The amount of data is huge and it’s growing exponentially. So, while there can be significant competitive advantages realized if you optimize your use of data, it is a double-edged sword, with significant downside risk as well.

Think of the impact that a serious data breach can have, the loss of a “bet your company” legal dispute, or the public perception you don’t treat personally sensitive data appropriately.
This is a massive problem for organizations of all kinds – private enterprise, government, education – no one is immune to the risks data poses.

But this is where Exterro helps. Our platform enables clients to understand what data they have, where it is located, what regulations apply to it, what third parties have access to it, and most importantly, respond quickly to requests for that data. A request could be e-discovery necessary for litigation, collecting evidence for an internal investigation, responding to a data subject access request, or fulfilling reporting obligations to data authorities after an incident or breach is identified, or any number of other business processes that are the responsibility of the legal department.

M.R. While that’s a broad set of capabilities, it’s not all that Exterro does, though, is it?

Bobby: No, and I’m glad you asked me that. I mentioned how Exterro can help with internal investigations or incident response earlier, and that’s due to our portfolio of FTK® digital forensic products. And while the use cases I mentioned previously are those that address corporate challenges, the largest market segment for forensic investigation solutions is law enforcement, which includes very large agencies in the federal government charged with protecting citizens as well as your local police department.

Our software is helping to stop crimes against children, human trafficking, terrorist plots, illegal drug smuggling, murders, and so forth. I’m extremely proud of the software platform our team has built, and the enviable list of Fortune 500 and Global 2000 customers who use our solutions, but it is a very different feeling – both humbling and gratifying – to know that we truly are helping to make the world a safer place.

M.R. Rangaswami is the Co-Founder of Sandhill.com

Meridian Technologies, a Consulting Solutions company, fills a full spectrum of skilled technical positions for some of the country’s largest organizations. Meridian meets the highest standard of excellence due to its focus on forging long-term relationships with deeply experienced consultants and building high-performance, service-oriented teams that produce results. Its scalable engagement models, from individual technology consultants to more strategic enterprise programs, enable clients to tap into world-class talent, expertise, and services to drive technology and enterprise transformation initiatives. 

As Executive Vice President at Meridian, Rick Stengard leads over 250 people in multiple regional sales and client-facing delivery teams across the commercial and government IT services sectors. His focus is on developing techniques, processes, and training to ensure scalable and repeatable growth. 

M.R. Rangaswami: What are some of the current challenges impacting the staffing of technical positions?

Rick Stengard: It’s a competitive market right now for highly skilled IT professionals. One thing we try to impress upon clients is the importance of speed—the faster we can move a strong candidate through the hiring process, the more likely it is they’ll accept an offer. Unfortunately, multiple interviews and homework to assess candidates aren’t as doable as they used to be.

Right now, the most skilled and qualified candidates are on the market for days, not weeks. One of the things we do at Meridian is to help our clients hire faster while maintaining the same level of talent quality. We spend time up front matching the right people with the right opportunity. A full gamut of screening is done before the interview process begins for the client, so the evaluation process can move faster.

Within the government sector, which is a key focus for us, one of the biggest challenges is sourcing talent with the required clearances and certifications. For federal government especially, clearances as well as technical certifications are needed for most people working with technology or in an IT capacity. Meridian continues to successfully migrate qualified tech talent from the commercial side to the public-sector side to fill the demand, including helping consultants get the proper clearances and certifications. 

M.R.: What have been the impacts of remote working on the workforce, including program delivery? 

Rick: Pre-pandemic, our consultants and technical professionals were almost exclusively onsite, meaning that people were relocated or had to travel to client facilities during the contracted period. This meant that oftentimes, access to talent was limited by geography or was attained at greater cost. Now, with cloud computing and the increasing acceptance of distributed work environments, the need for relocation and travel is less, reducing costs and widening the talent pool. 

Overall, we’ve found that our remote teams are just as effective. As a validating point, we have Agile software programs that have their performance measured on a quantifiable, point-based scale. The velocity of points being accrued per person and per hour has remained the same or in some cases even surpassed the levels seen during onsite work. 

M.R.: What should organizations look for in an IT staffing and solutions partner?

Rick: No matter what an organization’s staffing needs are, it comes down to the quality of the people. It’s the client that is taking the risk, so it’s vital to have faith in a partner that can identify people who deliver programs successfully.

There are many IT staffing solutions providers that will look at a job description and just provide a resume that checks the basic boxes. It’s important to have a partner that spends time pre-consulting with you to understand your needs—not only in terms of technical skills, clearances, and certifications—but also in terms of more intrinsic qualities to deliver exactly the right person. There are great software developers who won’t make good team leads because they aren’t good communicators or lack leadership skills, for example.

It’s also important that the partner doesn’t just step out of the process after the hire is made. Your partner should continue to manage talent post-hire and throughout the project to ensure successful program delivery and a satisfactory experience on both sides of the table. In fact, consultant care is a big part of Meridian’s culture. We believe that establishing long-term relationships with IT professionals that we have confidence in, and who are happy in their jobs, is key to providing the best human resources to our clients. Our consultant retention averages nearly 36 months and extends to as much as 10 years, which is exceptional in our industry. 

M.R. Rangaswami is the Co-Founder of Sandhill.com

At the forefront of OT and IoT Cybersecurity, Edgard Capdevielle and the team at Nozomi Networks are helping build a secure future for the world’s industrial and critical infrastructure.  Nozomi…

Moving from Oracle Corporation’s Senior Vice President to CEO at Platform9
Moving from Nokia Software’s president and chief digital officer to CEO at Platform9, Bhaskar Gorti is ready to speed up their go-to-market to support large-scale deployments and solidify their place as the leading open distributed cloud service

M.R. Rangaswami: Based on recent experience, what did you see happening in the cloud landscape and what are some of the unmet enterprise needs and opportunities to innovate?

Bhaskar Gorti: My recent experience was with Nokia as its President of Software and Chief Digital Officer, but I’ve been in enterprise software for most of my career, including as Senior Vice President and General Manager at Oracle Corporation, enabling B2B customers to modernize and become cloud native. Many of these customers have large, traditional non-cloud IT technologies to run many keep-the-lights-on operations in addition to cloud-based products for competitive differentiation.

A few years ago, a lot of companies talked about moving all of their IT infrastructure and applications to the public cloud. But what they all have realized is that moving infrastructure to the cloud is simply not enough to complete a cloud-native transformation. Companies who have tried to migrate from on-premises to a public cloud, or from one public cloud to another public cloud, know it’s not a trivial task.

The problem they are all trying to solve is how to have the flexibility and choice of using their own infrastructure for cloud-native applications while delivering a unified management and consumption experience of a public cloud.

Platform9 provides an elegant solution to this problem: delivering the power of cloud computing on the infrastructure of customer’s choice – whether that be public clouds, private infrastructure, or edge-sites – powered by Kubernetes and cloud-native technologies. Our platform delivers an open distributed cloud service, offering a neutral third option to public clouds and costly, time-consuming DIY.

Flexibility is crucial for enterprises to be able to drive their digital transformation and match their cloud capabilities to their business needs, and Platform9’s open distributed cloud is the optimal solution.

M.R.: Why did you join Platform9?

Bhaskar: I have known Platform9 and have interacted with Sirish Raghuram and Platform9’s other co-founders a few years ago while I was at Nokia developing a cloud-native software stack and looking for alternatives to DIY cloud-native orchestration and container management.  Platform9 has built and matured some phenomenal cloud-native technologies; they are a unique example of a disruptor company which has done very well with their platform and are leading in the cloud-native market segment. I was impressed with Platform9’s team, mission, and vision, especially their customer success stories, so when the chance to work alongside them came along I couldn’t pass the opportunity up.

My main goal is to help Platform9 build and grow the open distributed cloud category in order to allow enterprises across multiple new industries to reach their cloud-native transformation goals. By speeding up Platform9’s go-to-market to support more large-scale deployments of our software at major organizations across verticals, we will solidify our place as the leading open distributed cloud service.

M.R.: What are the biggest challenges and concerns you see customers facing?

Bhaskar: One of the things that I have learned over the years is that the most difficult task is to make complex things extremely simple. Customers are trying to solve very complex mission-critical problems of navigating between hyperscalers, on-premises data centers, and edge solutions. And it’s all so complex – what they really need is an open, cloud-agnostic platform to bring simplicity, agility, and a fast track so they can really focus on what is more important to them: organizational agility and competitive differentiation using modern cloud-native technologies.

With prior generations of technology, it was relatively easy to migrate to a new platform. In this new world of cloud-native, you cannot port. Simply lifting-and-shifting doesn’t really provide any agility and cost benefits. You have to start from scratch and build your cloud-native infrastructure and applications using a very different approach, grounded in cloud-native principles and technologies. This journey is fraught with challenges and cultural changes that most companies struggle with. They can benefit by using a partner like Platform9 with a cloud-native DNA and a platform that can speed up their transformation.

M.R. Rangaswami is the Co-Founder of Sandhill.com

As businesses make the transition to the next normal, organizations need to set new standards and upend old paradigms to build long-term strategic advantage while keeping sustainability at its core….

When it comes to AI programming, CrowdSmart.ai is moving beyond eavesdropping on social media and polling customers like test subjects. Rather, Amanda Reed and her team are working on pulling information from the collective’s intelligence.

A third-generation silicon valley entrepreneur, Amanda began her career in start-up sales and marketing, followed by early-stage venture capital, and she most recently led long-horizon innovation for one of the world’s largest sovereign wealth funds. Her new role as CrowdSmart.ai’s CEO is an exact fit for their use of collective intelligence and AI to help people make smarter decisions.

M.R. Rangaswami: The Great Resignation and customer frustration are two of the biggest consumer issues. How do you reverse these trends with AI? 

Amanda Reed: From my perspective, the essential frame of mind to retain and grow employees and customers in 2022 is how to offer them authentic engagement. It’s time we moved beyond eavesdropping on social media and polling our customers and employees like impersonal test subjects. Instead, we can use AI as a facilitator to draw these very important people and critical relationships into a virtual ‘room where it happens’ to anonymously and asynchronously work together to co-create successful strategies and products.

With AI we can do this at scale from a single cross-departmental project to hundreds of thousands of citizens.  Our concept of collective intelligence reduces human bias that affects decision accuracy while also creating an opportunity for iterative learning and recognition of the most influential ideas and participants. It is a critical idea and feedback loop that draws people in like a game and creates incredibly rich and predictive data. 

Typical top-down hierarchies have a hard time accessing and leveraging the knowledge and experience that exist at all levels in an organization. Our approach is to use AI to make it easy for anyone to harvest this insight and bring it into sharp focus for their specific purpose. CrowdSmart helps close the gap between top management, the customer front lines and the customers themselves.

M.R.: This sounds different from what people think when they think of Ai and decisions. How does it work?

Amanda: We’ve harnessed recent advancements in deep learning and NLP to create a patented AI that learns from human reasoning in real time. Our AI does not make decisions, it is designed to assist with the type of complex decisions that only humans can make and help predict their outcomes. In a CrowdSmart online conversation, the AI is working interactively with your fellow employees, customers or partners to proactively uplift diverse ideas and test for alignment at every step.

As the group anonymously learns and iterates with each other’s ideas and feedback, they are also refining the ‘signal’ and creating both qualitative and quantitative recommendations in real-time to the conversation organizer. You don’t need an analyst on your team to help you decide what to do because the results are clear and easy to understand. CrowdSmart provides the scale and speed to collect and refine the intelligence of the people around you so you can make smarter decisions.

M.R. I can think of so many places where this would be helpful, where do you start?

The pandemic has given us both the opportunity and the challenge. It is a fulcrum moment to rethink where ideas come from and dismantle the ‘inside vs. outside the company’ or the ‘exec suite vs. frontline worker’ mindset. When people realize they can easily capture the intelligence of people around them and those people will feel validated and valued, they have tons of ideas on how to use it from daily collaborations to very large projects.

We are making CrowdSmart simple to use by integrating it with Zoom to bring instant clarity to large calls. Zoom call organizers can quickly and easily ensure equitable participation and refined insights from any group by launching CrowdSmart during the call. They get real-time results on the call, and if necessary can avoid call fatigue by taking that same conversation and group of people off-camera and online for additional conversation, continued iteration, and ultimately very clear results.

CrowdSmart is a cloud service that supports companies, non-profits and government agencies with critical functions such as innovation on products and services, as well as strategic decisions such as how to grow revenue, which companies to buy and how to best optimize the integration and operations post-merger.

Our customers are often surprised by what they learn as CrowdSmart surfaces and refines new ideas that weren’t part of their original thinking. We are a purpose-driven business with a focus on helping everyday business users capture the insight of the people around them. We are also passionate about CrowdSmart’s opportunity to support major issues in society and we are proud to support leaders of social impact projects that fulfill our mission to help people understand each other and make smarter

M.R. Rangaswami is the Co-Founder of Sandhill.com

What does it take to lead through an era of exponential change?

Nascent trends — virtualization of the workspace, online learning, virtual health, and e-commerce — accelerated exponentially. Understandably, leaders have struggled mightily to address these overlapping changes simultaneously, dealing with economic, health, and logistical crises that have unfolded at top speed.

Watch this fireside chat between Yamini Rangan, CEO, HubSpot & MR Rangaswami, Founder, Indiaspora which will deep dive into:

– Her journey, learnings & pitfalls
– Shift to digital first & white spaces on the path on innovation
– Building right customer experience, specially for enterprise versus SMBs
– Metrics that matter while navigating complex buyer archetypes, silos, changing digital priorities, customer churn etc.
– Role of partnerships and acquisitions About NPC2021 (Dec 1-4, 2021)

The 18th edition of NPC is themed at “World class from India” is all about the transformation of businesses & lives, powered by technology and the ingenuity of India’s innovation ecosystem.

We are striving towards developing a seamless, transparent, and inclusive digital ecosystem that is driven by India’s world-class innovation capabilities. We are at a cusp of a product revolution which would be defined by two key things, ‘Technology & Innovation’, which is the core to develop world-class technology products and creating a robust ‘digital talent’ ecosystem to position India as a global talent hub. Leveraging the virtual nature of NPC this year, the content curation and speaker selection was aligned to what practitioners and aspirants of technology would look for.

To know more about NASSCOM Product Connect and its initiatives visit: https://nasscom.in/about-us/what-we-d…

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SEG’s Annual Report labels 2021 as an outstanding year for the software industry. M&A activity and valuations broke records once again. SaaS deal volume grew an astonishing 40% in 2021,…

Exiting stealth with $6M in funding, Mperativ, the first-ever revenue marketing platform has three goals they’re aiming for: to align marketing with sales, accelerate customer success, and finance teams on…

Elay Cohen is the Co-Founder and CEO of Saleshood, a Sales Enablement Platform. Recognized by Entrepreneur magazine as a “mover and shaker” in sales leadership and listed by LinkedIn as one of the world’s top sales experts.

Named Salesforce’s 2011 Executive of the Year by Marc Benioff after creating a Partner Relationship Management category and product line at Salesforce, Elay’s experience in B2B sales effeciencies is thoughtful and comprehensive.

M.R. Rangaswami: Why is sales enablement exploding now? 

Elay Cohen: There are three main factors. First, the pandemic has accelerated the need for organizations to have solutions to enable sales teams that are now mostly distributed and remote. Second, there’s been a tsunami of investment and funding announcements that has resulted in many more software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies. These companies want to grow fast and are looking for levers they can pull to achieve this growth. And third, sales enablement as a software category has matured to a point where senior sales and marketing leaders are measuring and correlating positive impact.

According to the B2B tech marketplace G2, sales enablement has recently surged in popularity, experiencing a 343% increase in adoption over the last five years, with significant impacts on sales (76% of organizations see an increase in sales between 6% and 20%). Compare this to a decade ago, when many organizations were not yet prioritizing sales enablement as a growth lever. Sales enablement has evolved from being a nice-to-have to being a must-have mission-critical system for growth.

At Salesforce, we created the sales enablement discipline and processes to ramp our sales and customer teams faster. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff had the vision to invest in sales enablement before it was a common business practice. We knew with sales enablement as a growth lever we could realize revenue faster.

It was the rocket fuel that propelled us into hyper growth. Based on our experience and success at Salesforce, we started Saleshood because the market lacked a scalable SaaS platform purpose-built for sales enablement.

M.R.: What changes to the sales profession are we seeing during COVID that will remain?

Elay: The simple truth is we’re not going to revert back to 100% in-person selling. The sales efficiencies realized during the pandemic will continue. Sellers and buyers appreciate the benefits of being remote and collaborating digitally.

People have become protective of their time. There’s less friction in the buying process and sales cycles are compressed. Sales tools like digital sales rooms (DSRs) where buyers and sellers come together to collaborate and drive better engagement are on the rise. Companies need to master digital selling or risk falling behind and losing out to competitors.

M.R.: With so many sales enablement tools being funded, what’s going to happen to the market?

Elay: We’re going to see massive consolidation in the sales tech space. Today there are so many solutions in the sales tech stack and they’re all in varying stages of maturity. Sales enablement, revenue operations, data cleansing, virtual selling, conversation intelligence — you name it. There are simply too many categories and there’s a ton of overlap, which will lead companies to start looking at their stack and questioning how many they really need. The same kind of consolidation happened in the marketing automation space in the early days of SaaS. The companies that rise to the top will be those that can deliver a seamless experience with tightly integrated systems and an end-to-end workflow that can win over the hearts and minds of their users.

Another trend we’ll see in the sales tech space is revenue teams will expect their systems to be smarter and more tailored to their roles and scenarios. AI (artificial intelligence) is playing a big role in defining the future of sales. It will streamline systems, workflows and processes for sellers (and buyers), helping to deliver more actionable insights. Expect to see AI become the standard in the sales tech stack.

M.R. Rangaswami is the Co-Founder of Sandhill.com

SEG’s 3Q21 SaaS Public Market Update is a snapshot of how public companies are performing in our SEG SaaS Index. The Index is comprised of 99 publicly traded companies that…