Thought Leaders in Internet of Things: Danny Yu, CEO of DainTree (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Who else besides Enlighted falls in that pool?

Danny Yu: We don’t compete with some of the companies directly. There’s a company called Digital Lumens that sells fixtures and controls. We, on the other hand, don’t sell the fixtures but sell the controls and the software. They sell this bundled solution where they offer their fixtures and their control system as well as the ability to connect with another fixture, but you require their proprietary end-device to go into that.

Sramana Mitra: I imagine that, just like you, everybody else in the space goes to market through channel.

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Building a Global Technology Company from Australia: Avoka CEO, Phil Copeland (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: Where do you sell? Do you sell primarily in Australia or do you sell globally?

Phil Copeland: Australia is a great marketplace because they’re very early adopters of technology. Very early on, we recognized that to really succeed in this industry, you need to become an American-established business and you need to have a lot of the momentum behind your business here in North America. I’m actually based in Colorado. We have an office here. I spend about 80% of my time here helping grow and expand our North American business. We also have a small operation in the UK that has been very successful as well. Our core focus is really getting to critical size here in North America, because we realized that the exit events that may occur in the future will be from an American company.

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Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Mike Burkland, CEO of Five9 (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Are there any direct competitors in your cloud-based ACD routing area?

Mike Burkland: We have a few direct competitors. They are typically hybrid companies or hybrid solutions; they are not solely focused on providing cloud-based solution for ACD. One such direct competitor is a company called Interactive Intelligence that started out years ago as an on-premise solution. They still get, I believe, close to 90% of their revenue from their legacy on-premise business. They’ve also come out with a cloud offering, but from a business model and a revenue mix perspective, they’re still predominantly an old model company, if you will.

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Thought Leaders in Internet of Things: Danny Yu, CEO of DainTree (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: If you were to look at your entire customer base, who are some of the off-the-chart leaders in adopting this kind of optimization?

Danny Yu: We can look at folks like United Stationers, an office products distributor. They have an office facility and also have some warehouse distribution. We’re deployed in a project with them where we are controlling every single LED light fixture on, what we call, a granular basis. Every fixture can be controlled discreetly. If you have a specific light over your head, you can control that specific light. Why is that project interesting? There are several factors. One is the amount of energy savings we achieve through converting from old fluorescent technology to LED plus controls. It’s over 90% energy savings. That’s a tremendous amount. >>>

Building a Global Technology Company from Australia: Avoka CEO Phil Copeland (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: I think there is that, but there’s also a process that you have articulated very clearly. We have seen this process come up many times. This process of following a product that is somewhat successful in the market and doing this kind of system integration and value-added reseller work on top of it so that you basically simmer in customer scenarios. Where the art comes in is to figure out which problem can give you enough of an opportunity to build a real product and a business out of it.

Phil Copeland: You learn as you go. The big waves that have changed over my 25 or 30 years is obviously that whole launch of the PC industry and the opportunities that it created and the client server computing revolution. These are big changes in the industry and have had major impacts. I missed out on the Internet revolution when it first came along, but then the launch of tablets and iPad just had a profound impact on the way that everybody does business.

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Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Mike Burkland, CEO of Five9 (Part 2)

Mike Burkland: To map out the landscape, this is a market in which Avaya, Genesys, Aspect, and Cisco have a product. Those four legacy players control a very large majority of this legacy market. They’ve been around for several years providing solutions on-premise that are hardware and software-based.

Sramana Mitra: These four legacy players have both switching and CRM and you consider them as direct competitors? You also do switching and CRM?

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Thought Leaders in Internet of Things: Danny Yu, CEO of DainTree (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: It takes time to fully deploy the solution. If you have one customer with 20 to 40 facilities, it takes time to get it fully deployed, right?

Danny Yu: Yes. The way this works with existing buildings is they typically want to do some type of an upgrade to the facility. You time yourself with capital budget around energy efficiency. If you do well and they like that, they will keep rolling it out. We have had one customer, in the grocery area, that went from talking through our channel partner in December 2013 to getting the first trial to a particular end customer of theirs. We did our trial in February 2914, and we received orders for 50 facilities about three months later. >>>

Building a Global Technology Company from Australia: Avoka CEO Phil Copeland (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Let me get a bit more granular in some of these steps. When you started getting the sense that there was this product opportunity while you were essentially acting as a reseller and system integrator on top of what became the Adobe technology, what was your business situation? You were a self-financed company. What kind of revenue levels were you pulling at that point? What year are we talking about?

Phil Copeland: We started Avoka in late 2002. By about 2011, we were probably up to $10 or $11 million in revenue through a lot of consulting services work. We used to sell some of the Adobe products as well as our own products. We’d grown that business from scratch to around $10 million in revenue. We were starting to get a small amount of money from selling our own product as well but it was relatively small in those early years. >>>