SIIA AATC Speaker Profile

Name: Mark Cuningham
Title: Founder & Cheif Executive Officer
Company: Indicee

Bio:
Mark Cunningham is a thought leader and entrepreneur with more than 20 years’ experience in the business intelligence (BI) industry. He has been on the founding team of four successful startups, including his current role as Founder & CEO of cloud BI company,Indicee. As a strong advocate for cloud computing and social business, Mark is passionate about bringing greater insight and data-driven decision making to the new breed of social enterprise.

Mark began his entrepreneurial career in 1992, when his family company began building the world’s first Windows-based reporting tool, Crystal Reports. Crystal was later acquired by Business Objects for $820M.

Home town: Vancouver, BC.

First job: Well, it depends on how far back I go! I collected golf balls from the water hazards and resold them to the golfers during my years in elementary school. I painted fences in high school. I worked as a bike courier during university. I guess my first real job was working on the team that created Crystal Reports.

What are you currently reading? I just finished reading Neil Young’s autobiography and now I am reading Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely, and Social Business by Design by Dion Hinchcliffe and Peter Kim.

All-time favorite music: I am a guitar player so I can’t answer that question. There are too many to choose. But I play rock, blues and jazz with a few of the bands that I’m in.

What is the best meal you have had recently? I had a great pork loin dish at Bix in San Francisco recently.

What is your next (dream) career? Vintage Cars and Guitars….buy, sell…whatever. I just like being around them. If I can make money along the way too, that would be cool.

Hobbies: Guitar, photography, kitesurfing, aviation, vintage cars, cycling…the list is long.

What do you think is the hot button issue for the software & services industry in 2013?
2013 will be all about “social business” and the advancement of technologies to support the new, collaborative way of working. This trend has seen many ISVs build social elements into the core of their applications over the last couple of years; in some cases, completely overhauling product suites or building new apps from scratch. This year, I expect to see greater sophistication in the tools that are helping to drive social business performance, including an increased demand for analytics. Businesses now want empirical evidence on the effectiveness of their social activities and the technologies they are using to support it. The need to link social strategies to business objectives is something we’re hearing all the time right now at Indicee and for that reason, I think 2013 will be a big growth year for social business analytics vendors.

What are you looking forward to most at AATC?
Can I only pick one? In that case, I’d have to say that I’m most looking forward to joining the panel on Selling More with Sales Intelligence. We have an interesting take on this subject at Indicee as we’ve been working with customers to prove, with real data, that using social channels internally to grow collective sales intelligence has a positive impact on sales performance. It should be a great conversation. I’m also excited to hear about this year’s NextGen companies, as we were winners last year. Oh, and the speed networking sounds fun. Ok, so that was three things…

Why is your company a member of SIIA?
We’ve been SIIA members for almost two years now and really value the networking opportunities that come with our membership. All About the Cloud is a great example of this!