Vision from the Top 2012: Lonnie Wills, CloudTrigger

In 2020, looking back on this decade, what will be the single most impactful technical advancement driving business growth?

The movement of previously enterprise only technologies and business tools, such as analytics, to the cloud are game changers for mid-market and smaller sized businesses. The reduction in the total cost of ownership (TCO) provided by cloud solutions enable smaller organizations to compete on another scale if they take advantage of the SaaS applications to create more intelligent organizations. They now have the ability to analyze their data; host their data and services; create better customer experiences and have mobile access to not only their own, but partner, customer and market data to make informed, smart and effective decisions quickly. SaaS is about democratizing enterprise applications creating a new playing field for business to compete. If your company is not leveraging SaaS Analytics in the next 5 years you won't be a leader in your vertical and most likely not be in business. IBM is investing over 7 Billion in Analytics over the next 5-7 years to support customers' needs to become more predictive around buying trends, selling trends and market indicators. Ultimately moving the information downstream to the individual employee who can be empowered to make informed and timely decisions with reliable, intelligent analysis.

Given that the economic outlook in many parts of the world seems uncertain:
What's your philosophy on maintaining a focus on innovation?

CloudTrigger has invested heavily in R&D since its inception, creating the G2 Product line of innovative, cloud based analytics solutions that includes G2 Maps and G2 Analytics. We partner with only best in class companies that also focus on innovation, such as ESRI, IBM and Salesforce.com. CloudTrigger is focused on creating innovative solutions that compliment SaaS based solutions with the goal to enable every employee to have access to powerful, mobile tools that help them be more successful at what they do each day.

How do you encourage and foster a growth mindset with your employees and partners?

We work with our customers as trusted advisors in the Cloud Space helping them achieve change management throughout their organization by adopting new cloud technologies. This valuable insight helps our employees and partners stay in alignment with the needs of our customers to drive successful solutions to the market place. CloudTrigger and our partners see the gaps in current solutions and we think creatively and strategically about how to fill these gaps on a larger scale, evidenced by our products G2 Maps and G2 Analytics. Lastly, we encourage everyone in the company to bring their product ideas and suggestions forward and have weekly open forums to discuss product ideas and the company's priorities.

What do you do as CEO to keep your organization focused on customers and value?

CloudTrigger is a solution company whose success is built on our customers' success; our ability to listen combined with our deep cloud domain expertise allows us to present our customers with fully integrated solutions. We reward our employees based on the metrics we drive around customer satisfaction and loyalty, incentivizing the right behavior to create a world class customer experience. We don't stop with our customers as we follow the same principles with our employees. We have a great culture built on treating employees with respect, giving them the support they need to do their jobs well, benefits so they can live well and even all expenses paid "Club" trips for exemplary employees.

Does Mobile fall into one of your top 5 priorities for 2012? If so, how will you be attacking it? If not, why not?

Absolutely, as mobile becomes more and more ubiquitous for consumer applications it drives the point home on how critical it is to have strong mobile applications to help run your business every day as well. Insight and access to your business data will be critical in the future as we will be expected to respond quickly to the daily demands of our jobs regardless of where we are physically. Companies need to adopt mobile solutions that extend the capability of their business applications to their employees providing them with the tools to be effective in the market place. More and more companies, including CloudTrigger, have employees located remotely all over the world or in the field for the majority of their job. The model of the worker at his/her desk at company headquarters for 8 hours a day is something of the past. People work from all over, across time zones and continents; therefore not only do we build custom mobile solutions for our customers, it is also part of all of our product road maps to incorporate mobile solutions.

As an example when we launched G2 Maps we worked in parallel to create a companion native iPad app and the road map includes additional mobile platforms like Android in 2012. G2 Analytics will launch officially in May and we have incorporated a powerful mobile platform for access to your analytics reports and dashboards on any mobile device, which easily moves the back office domain knowledge to the fingertips of all employees whether they are at HQ or in the field. This also allows C-Level execs access to mission critical data about their business anytime and anywhere. Helping them make better, more informed decisions to drive profitability and growth. Both solutions, G2Maps and G2Analytics provide powerful advantages for increasing your organization's efficiency and effectiveness that is not offered anywhere else.

This interview was published in SIIA's Vision from the Top, a Software Division publication released at All About the Cloud 2012.