Sramana: How does your affiliate market help entrepreneurs grow their business? Carl Theobald: Affiliates are really a reflection of how this new online world is not only leveling the playing field for start-ups, but providing the resources for entrepreneurs to focus on what they do best and outsource the rest. In this case, they can
Sramana Mitra: There is a lot of data out there that is not organized with the right metadata for that particular function – whatever that function may be. In your case, it is access control and IT governance. In somebody else’s case, it is customer data related to recommendation engines. Whatever is the business logic
Sramana Mitra: Numerous companies come through in this series that are working in that area. We are tracking that trend. Steven Levy: We have gone through a bunch of changes to our own product and technology. If you look back and look at how the web developed, the first tools that came out tried to
Sramana: It seems that many of your mid-market customers could be coming in through the self-service channel as well. Have you found that to be the case? Carl Theobald: That is a very good point. Our self-service channel is a very good sales tool. Software AG is a customer of ours that came to us
Sramana Mitra: We have been talking to many people in this space. One thing is very clear – all the real opportunities to differentiate in terms of applications are in the layer where there is actual heuristics and business logic that can be created. That presupposes that you have metadata and rules based on metadata.
Sramana Mitra: Where your technology is shining is where you have composite apps that span multiple different systems. Steven Levy: You have it exactly right. You can imagine that those apps’ integration is difficult to do – that is one of the things we provide key value in. When you do that integration, you go
Sramana: Let’s talk a bit more about how the company is being built. How do you build and scale from here? Carl Theobald: The company had focused on the self-service market, which meant we had a very small direct sales organization. Once we realized the solution was acceptable for larger customers, as well as the
Sramana Mitra: Is there another use case you would like to discuss? David Gibson: The one thing we talked about is the archiving and migration. All these platforms are a bit different in terms of how they are set up. SharePoint has SharePoint groups, Windows has NTFS permissions and share permissions, etc. What we are