Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Mark Mader, CEO of Smartsheet (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What use cases are you finding adoption in?

Mark Mader: The marketing operations is a big center of gravity within our businesses. They typically have many touch points within an organization who are responsible for either bringing something to market or managing the development of something. They’re usually the coordinators. When we look at the personas within our customers, they are very distinct users. Some of them are people who initiate process but they don’t invite anybody. Others are >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Mark Mader, CEO of Smartsheet (Part 3)

Mark Mader: The second piece is a fundamental shift away from how Google Spreadsheets and Excel store their data. When we think about work and tracking items, we don’t think about it as a collection of cells as you have in a spreadsheet. We think about it as a unit of work. A row within our world represents a unit of work whether it’s a task, contact, or candidate. These are all things that exist within our applications. We’ve found that while people like the simplicity and flexibility of spreadsheets, what very often happens was when they shared those with others, people would make changes that were very unpredictable. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Mark Mader, CEO of Smartsheet (Part 2)

Mark Mader: One of the categories that really took quite some time to move was one of the biggest ones, the Office Suite. As we look at all the different categories that are forming today, many of them have direct analogs to the pre-cloud world. One of the things that we found fascinating was that as Office was trying to figure out what its life in the cloud was going to be, there were two big companies that were going to help shape that. Microsoft being the obvious one and the other one was Google. They are working to bring the traditional Office Suite and the components of Office – Word, Excel, and PowerPoint – to the cloud.

What we found, as a huge opportunity, was if Office was going to be reinvented in the modern day with these mobile devices in the cloud, would it really look as Office was defined 20 years ago? >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Mark Mader, CEO of Smartsheet (Part 1)

This conversation takes our coverage of the cloud-based productivity space further.

Sramana Mitra: Mark, let’s introduce our audience to yourself as well as Smartsheet.

Mark Mader: I’m the CEO of Smartsheet. We are a Software-as-a-Service provider that serves about 40,000 businesses today in over 150 countries. The category of solution that we provide is enabling teams and businesses to collaborate on work and projects more effectively. That sounds like a very expansive category but in essence, it is one that is going through tremendous change right now as individuals and companies are trying to figure out how to adjust to working in a networked, cloud-based model. >>>

Serial Entrepreneur, Self-Financing to $50 Million: GoGrid CEO, John Keagy (Part 1)

If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. 

John spent $200,000 to get to his first million in 18 months with GoGrid. One year from that, the company got to $5 million. Today, they are at over $50 million in revenue run-rate, all organically grown. Read John’s insights on a tightly managed entrepreneurial journey.

Sramana Mitra: John, let’s start with introducing our audience to you personally. Where are you from? What’s your background?

John Keagy: I was born in Evanston, Illinois. I went to University of California, Berkley. I came to the West to chase gold like the miners did, because Silicon Valley is a great place to forge a career.

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Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Simon Cooper, CIO of ServicePower (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Can you elaborate on that? Can you use an example to explain what you’re talking about?

Simon Cooper: If you take a large retailer, for example, they may be using SAP as their primary system. Then, when they source work out to third-parties and they want to get data back in a timely fashion, there’s a mixture of third-party software that they use. They might just be using QuickBooks application or another might be using some of the SMB software that’s specifically designed for saving appliance space. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Simon Cooper, CIO of ServicePower (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Talk about two or three customers and really double-click down into how they’re using your product.

Simon Cooper: If we look at the US, we have a Tier One retailer that uses the application. They have quite a substantial field service workforce that is out on the road every day. They use the scheduling tool, GPS tracking tool, and business intelligence tool to manage that workforce. They also use our third-party tool to place work into and extract out of that third-party space. They can act both as a job provider and a service provider, on both sides of that equation. That allows them to basically manage their workload. They can obviously fill-up less staff with the work they’re receiving directly.

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Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Simon Cooper, CIO of ServicePower (Part 1)

The field service industry is heavily impacted by cloud computing. Here’s a short conversation with one of the players.

Sramana Mitra: Simon, let’s introduce our audience to you as well as to ServicePower.

Simon Cooper: My name is Simon Cooper. I’m the CIO of ServicePower. ServicePower has been in the field service management space since the early ‘90s. Originally, we were funded from a research project in Europe as part of ICL Fujitsu to develop artificial intelligence-based algorithms to solve complex scheduling problems. From there, we’ve evolved into a field service management leader. >>>