It is time to come up for air after having put my blog on sabbatical the last two years. A sabbatical wasn’t really planned…it started out as a case of blogstipation which was followed by the all-consuming task of launching a new company RealWeld Systems, Inc.
Fast forward to today and I’m excited to join the board of Sitrion as the company executes on its multi-ecosystem strategy. For over a decade while I was at Open Text, the company evolved from being entirely independent with no integration or major partnerships to having compelling integration and partnerships with SAP, Microsoft, and Oracle. During that time, our sales and product evolved from the paraphrased positioning “we are the greatest” to “we are the greatest working with systems you’ve already bought”.
Creating win-win scenarios for the customer and partner, decision trade-offs on depth versus quantity of integration, and properly positioning added-value for all parties in a language familiar to the customer are just some of the strategic multi-ecosystem issues worth wrestling about.
In 2014, I will spend most of my time continuing to grow RealWeld, which has the opportunity to revolutionize manual welding training, credentialing, and quality assurance. In addition to Sitrion, I’ll also spend board member time for Seen Digital Media, Inc who provides an application for visual marketing campaigns for leading brands. Every time I’m in a deep discussion about one of these companies, I find myself writing an “ah-ha” reminder or action for one of the others. Being a startup operator, I can relate better to Daniel and Brian as the CEO’s of Sitrion and Seen respectively. And being a board member makes me a better operator of RealWeld. It’s an awesome cycle of filtering on the best business ideas, practices, and people from a diverse set of companies. It has already been a fun year!
S M T W T F S - There is No Someday 