“The relationship that you can create within a startup between the team is so cool to watch. …it’s the energy, it’s the passion behind the team members that has been to me one of the most rewarding things to see.”

Interview by Mike Sullivan

xPeerient is a community of CIOs and IT leaders that enables IT departments to dramatically reduce the hassle, time and risk associated with making IT spending decisions. The company is focused on streamlining the process of buying and selling enterprise IT solutions to make it more efficient, trust-based and effective for both IT buyers and solution providers.

MO:
Where did the concept for xPeerient come from?

Mark:
I have been in IT for about 25 years or so and mostly on kind of the IT buyer side. I’ve been director of IT, VP of IT, and eventually the CIO. So I’ve been on that side of the fence for all of my career basically and have always struggled with the relationship that you have to the IT vendor community. When you get into the CIO position, it’s kind of like throwing blood in the water with a bunch of sharks. You get hired by a company to be the CIO, and before you know it, every potential vendor in the world is calling you trying to get your business and trying to sell you anything. That dynamic is just very frustrating for the IT buyer, for anyone who’s in an executive role as an IT person. xPeerient was built as a way to try to rationalize that process and take the feeding frenzy away and change the dynamics of the relationships. Rather than blood in the water, we try to have it be an equal marketplace where both parties come at this much more rationally, with a little bit less friction and less tension.

MO:
Who are your customers and what is the service that you provide to them?

Mark:
Yeah, so we have three sets of clients. Our first client is the chief information officer at enterprises. So we’re dealing with the CIO from the Weather Channel, from Equifax, from the The Limited, from EchoStar, The Sports Authority, etc. So these are the heads of IT for these companies. They will obviously join the platform. It’s a free platform for them, so there’s no cost. They bring in their entire IT organization, and it’s a way for them to connect to the IT seller, to the IT vendor. There’s some other stuff with that as well.

The second sets of clients are the IT vendor. So this would be an IBM, Oracle, Microsoft, you name it, all the major IT software and hardware manufacturers. The third sets of clients are those manufacturers’ channel partners. If you’re in Oracle, about 70% of your selling actually is routed indirectly through the sales channels, not directly from Oracle salespeople so that they rely upon all of those literally tens of thousands of channel partners that they have around the world to do the bulk of their selling to the small to mid-size enterprise – so enterprises below $1 billion in revenue. We sit in between that triangle, between the CIO and the two sets of selling organizations on the other side. So Oracle and then all of Oracle’s channel partners. We obviously track all of the relationships between all of those. The relationship between Oracle and a channel partner, and between the project that an enterprise is putting in and the channel partner and the vendor. So we sit in the very heart of the marketplace, looking at what an IT buyer is trying to accomplish and then connecting them and doing matching to both the vendor and to the vendor’s channel partners.

MO:
What steps did you take to prepare for the launch of xPeerient?

Mark:
We’ve got about 3,500 vendors and partners already on the platform, and we went through a very exhaustive process beginning about a year and a half ago where I went to Guru.com, just to give a shout out to them, found about eight to ten researchers. So we built an initial interface into the database, and they then went out to, for example the Cisco website and they pulled in all of Cisco’s products. That’s about 800 products – all of the descriptions of the products, what the products did. Then they went to Cisco’s partner locater, and we identified about 10 to 15 of their partners across the country. Then we went in to each one of those partners and we pulled in all their locations and all of the solutions and products that those partners sold and resold. All of that data goes into greasing the innards of the system that we’ve got. We’ve got about 45,000 products already in the system, and these are a Cisco voice over IP product to a solution that a system integrator might have in the Chicago area that’s a Cisco reseller. It’s a lot of data that we’re doing to matching. The core of the platform is a matchmaking platform. We match the requirements of a project against the capabilities of a vendor or the capabilities of a solution partner or of a product. At the same time, we also map the requirements of a project to what other CIOs have done. There’s a huge social play to this.

MO:
What has been your marketing strategy to get the word out on xPeerient?

Mark:
We took about a year and a half to build out the core product. It’s a very deep and wide application built on Java for those of you that are techies. We did most of our development out of India with about 15 to 20 developers over the course of year and a half. It’s a very deep, wide application, but the core of what we’ve been doing from a go-to-market perspective has been really focusing on two main sets of clients. Obviously the CIO. Given my background as a CIO, I also used to be the CIO for CIO Magazine, so I know a lot of CIOs. When I was in the position, I founded a community called the CIO Executive Council, which is a community of CIOs. So obviously, I’ve been talking to this amongst my peers, my CIO peers and friends and colleagues for many, many months and bringing them to the market and getting them excited about it, getting them in as founding members so we could really focus our attention on them. The step one is make sure that we have the buyers there. Then step two is we’re working with all the major IT vendors – IBM, Oracle, Cisco, HP, EMC, etc. – and letting them know about what we are doing and asking for their specific support in getting their partners involved. So Oracle has put about 100 of their premier partners across the country on our platform. Avaya has done something similar. ADNET has done something similar, and we’re beginning to expand that reach pretty dramatically over the course of the next couple of months.

MO:
xPeerient is currently a virtual company. How well does that work for you?

Mark:
It’s a logical design for the business model for where we are. Where we are is doing everything you can as a startup to conserve cash. If we can knock off $5,000 a month in rent, then that’s great. The biggest struggle is the fact that occasionally you’ve got to get together with someone and meet face to face and get the team and whiteboard and all that other stuff. Obviously Skype is our office. We do lot’s of screen sharing, and there are lots of really cool tools out there in the net space to be able to do screen sharing and content sharing. We use Dropbox as a virtual file server. We use Skype for phone calls, and we use something called Join.me for screen sharing; very cool, kind of Flash based program. So we’re doing everything we can to at this point to conserve cash. We will definitely need to get an office at some point much to the chagrin of the team members because they like being able to work in their slippers. It’s hard. I mean occasionally you’ve just got to get to someone in a room and work.

MO:
What’s the most rewarding part of owning your own business?

Mark:
Network for big companies, mid-sized companies. I’ve had a lot of people working for me. What the most exciting thing is to see the team. A lot of these are people that I’d worked with previously that have come to work with me again. To see their sense of ownership of the company. It’s not just a job for them. It’s not just a “I’m going to work from 9 to 5 and then hang out and come back and work 9 to 5 tomorrow.” Their level of investment and engagement in the company, it’s their company. The relationship that you can create within a startup between the team is so cool to watch. So it’s the energy, it’s the passion behind the team members that has been to me one of the most rewarding things to see, because you can have a great idea, you can have a great site, a great product, but ultimately it’s the people that you work with who make it happen. I would honestly say the team is the best part of what I do.