“We’ve been doing customer satisfaction surveys for five years and have consistently had a 90+ percent rate of customer satisfaction.”

Interview by Mike Sullivan

Geoffrey Citron is a founder and the president of Nomia Inc., which operates Thoughtbus.com, a growing email and collaboration Cloud Services provider for small to midsized organizations throughout the United States. Thoughtbus was established to provide customer organizations with exceptional hosted email and collaboration capabilities in a Microsoft environment, while also delivering industry-leading customer service. Geoffrey is also an investor and member of the board of directors of WhatEveryBabyNeeds.com, an online boutique featuring organic and eco-friendly clothing, toys, and accessories for newborn to 4.  Geoffrey is a graduate of Carnegie Mellon University with an undergraduate degree in Mechanical Engineering, and he received his Master’s degree in Computer Science from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1996.

Prior to founding Nomia Inc. in 2003, Geoffrey worked for 15 years in the information technology sector in a number of roles. Starting in 1988, he defined, implemented and supported a variety of factory automation systems at Pratt & Whitney, drawn to their slogan at the time of ‘Thrust You Can Trust’. He and 3 colleagues started Matrix Computing Solutions, Inc. in Connecticut in 1994, to provide customer organizations with exceptional Microsoft systems integration and technical support services, along with custom software development. In 1996, Matrix was selected by IBM Global Services to design and implement the systems integration for a very large infrastructure rollout for the state government of New York, with over 100 locations and supporting over 15,000 people.  Matrix grew considerably over several years with a variety of projects from New York City to Burlington, Vermont; and was acquired by Vista IT of Herndon, Virginia in 2000. Geoffrey continued to provide technical consulting services for Vista IT, until Vista was acquired by Avaya Inc. in 2003.

MO:
How did you come to discover there was a need for an e-mail and collaboration cloud services provider?

Geoff:
Well, prior to starting Nomia Inc. and Thoughtbus, I was doing systems integration and application development consulting and worked with a number of organizations in the Northeast who were implementing Exchange and SharePoint and found that, you know, we were providing them with great capabilities, but a lot of the deployments were fairly similar. So it seemed like it made sense to provide this service on a hosted basis, so that we can get the costs way, way lower and maintain the same level of capability that our customers were getting on these consulting engagements.

MO:
What exactly is e-mail and collaboration cloud services?

Geoff:
I mean, you’ve got your basic e-mail, but also you’ve got the capability to share your calendar, to share your contact list, to share your e-mail with other people, very seamlessly, very easily. So that’s right there within the exchange server capability. Then with SharePoint, you’ve got the capability to have document libraries. You can do document management. You can have a bunch of people working on a set of documents and they can check them out and check them in so you have control over the documents. You’re not going to lose any work. It is a really straightforward arrangement for them to be able to do that kind of thing. SharePoint also provides an intranet capability where you can have a variety of information there including calendars, projects, and team information. It just makes a really collaborative environment for the organization to let them get their work done faster and better.

MO:
How do your clients benefit from working with Thoughtbus.com?

Geoff:
Well, that’s really been what we’ve been evolving ever since we started the company. We started out with Exchange 2003 and SharePoint Team Services, evolved to Exchange 2007 and Windows SharePoint Services 3. Now, we’re evolving again to Exchange 2010 and SharePoint Foundation 2010. Basically, the e-mail and collaboration capabilities of Exchange plus SharePoint are just a great fit to a wide variety of small to mid-sized organizations. So it really helps them be very productive and not have a lot of distractions while being productive and being able to just let them concentrate more on their core business and leave the generic e-mail and collaboration capabilities to us.

MO:
What does the typical Thoughtbus client look like?

Geoff:
The typical client of Thoughtbus is anywhere from 5 people to 500 people. It is a pretty wide range. Our customers are in a variety of different industries. Basically, the services we provide are fairly generic in that everybody needs e-mail and collaboration capabilities. It is just really the glue that helps the organization hold it together and helps it to be more productive. As far as our typical customer, we don’t really have a typical customer. With the capabilities that we provide them, we’ve been doing customer satisfaction surveys for five years and have consistently had a 90+ percent rate of customer satisfaction. So, our customers do like what we are doing for them regardless of what industry they are in.

MO:
What made you decide to start your own company?

Geoff:
Well, basically, this wasn’t the first time I started a new company. In fact, with three other guys we started a company called Matrix Technologies back in 1993, just about exactly 10 years before I started Nomia Inc. in 2003. So, back then, we were all working at Pratt & Whitney, which makes jet engines, and we decided to start a business. That business allowed me to work full time for it starting in 1996. We built that business up, and in 2000, we sold that business to Vista IT. Then I started working for Vista IT at that point. Three years later, they got bought by Avaya, at which point I decided it was time to start a new business. So that’s when I started Nomia Inc. It’s just been going on from there.

MO:
What has been the biggest challenge with running your own business?

Geoff:
The biggest challenge really initially when you only have one or two people there, it is quite a bit of effort to make sure that you’re providing highly available service the way that we are. As we get more people involved, more people on our team, it becomes easier in that regard, and you have different types of challenges that are involved more with managing and working with a diverse group of people. So the initial challenges were probably the toughest I would say, but certainly every day there’s new challenges.