Bamboos Year in Review: Marc OBrien Introduces the Bamboo Online Applications Division
Published 12/18 courtesy of Bamboo Solutions Community
Editor's note: Last year we introduced the Bamboo Year in Review feature, kicking off with a note from the desk of the CEO and including in-depth Q&As with each of the Bamboo department heads. In keeping with the Bamboo commitment to transparency, we're going to make the Year in Review feature an annual Bamboo Nation tradition. In this installment, we introduce Marc O'Brien, who heads up the Bamboo Online Applications division.
You're heading up an entirely new division at Bamboo. What is the mission of your group?
Bamboo is extending our Web Part leadership position in the SharePoint marketplace into hosted SharePoint applications, which my team will develop and bring to market.
You're new to Bamboo. What did you do before joining the company?
Most recently, I was the founder and CEO of Projity. Acquired by Serena earlier this year, Projity was responsible for the browser-based project management applications Project-ON-Demand and OpenProj. OpenProj has now been translated into fifteen languages, and there are over two million users in 142 countries. Previous positions I've held include: co-founder and CEO of WebProject Inc., which pioneered the first Web-based and hosted project solution; CEO of ERP vendor, Celantra Software Systems; and North American sales lead for the Scitor Corporation.
What led you to choose SharePoint as the ideal platform for hosted applications at this point?
Microsoft's commitment to hosted SharePoint and the Cloud, combined with the fact that there are already over seventy million users worldwide. I have a strong conviction that Software as a Service (SaaS) provides a superior "Time to Value" for users. There is no IT to schedule, nor installation, configuration, or updates to cycle through. With hosted applications, instant access is available anytime/anywhere, and on a monthly subscription model rather than the budget-busting expenditures which often accompany on-premises solutions. SaaS provides all of this, while also leveraging the SharePoint platform for its out-of-the-box functionality and installed base.
Upon its release in January, Bamboo Requirements Manager (Bamboo RM) will be the first hosted application to be offered by your division. Why start with requirements management?
Requirements management is ideally suited for the SaaS marketplace. The ability for geographically dispersed teams to collaborate and communicate on a requirements management tool is ideal. Frankly, I feel that the current market is dominated by legacy applications with little innovation. Consequently, the current SaaS market is wide open for Bamboo.
You're managing a geographically dispersed team yourself. Would it be safe to assume that you're leveraging SharePoint's native strengths to help manage the team and its projects?
Yes, the Bamboo Online Applications team is located in California, France and India. The hosted SharePoint capabilities allow our team to communicate and collaborate effectively, anytime/anyplace. In fact, we are already using our initial requirements management solution, Bamboo RM, to manage our own internal project requirements.
Will Bamboo Online Applications be offering hosted versions of any existing Bamboo applications?
Yes, there are plans to bring Project Management Central to a SaaS model. Timing and details surrounding this release will be announced in January.
What can you share about additional products on the roadmap for your group in 2010?
Our group will be continuing to broaden our offerings in 2010. Though we're not yet prepared to publicly announce them, I can say that we're planning to release multiple applications which will provide significant coverage for small and medium-sized businesses.
Will your division have its own sales team or will you be leveraging Emily Bien's organization for sales of hosted offerings?
Our group will have dedicated sales and support personnel for each SaaS application. We will, of course, work closely with Emily and her team, but the sales process is different for SaaS applications.
You attended SharePoint Conference 2009 in Las Vegas. What were your key takeaways regarding SharePoint, SharePoint 2010, and Bamboo's place in the SharePoint ecosystem?
Bamboo has an incredible opportunity in a high-growth market. The SaaS business will draft off the enormous commitment Microsoft is making in Cloud computing. The Bamboo brand is strong and is being leveraged effectively under Lily Griffin's guidance, and it's a goal of the Online Applications division to extend the Bamboo brand into a leadership position in the hosted SharePoint space.
What are the pillars of Bamboo's philosophy with regard to hosted services?
This is the key to SaaS success: We provide an accelerated Time to Value for the customer. A prospect can request a trial, validate, get provisioned with a new account in the Bamboo data center, login to Bamboo RM and find sample project data all within a single minute. This is the User Experience we are driving which represents a key differentiator over on-premises software. We are building the business, design and development included, with a defined five-minute, thirty-minute, and one-day User Experience expectation.
We have defined what we expect an average user will accomplish in the first five minutes, and have built the auto-provisioning process and provide sample projects to allow for this to be executed. In effect, we define what our expectations are for the user within the five-minute, thirty-minute, and one-day timeframes. This approach has led to numerous design changes during the course of developing the Bamboo RM application, and we're eager to receive user feedback upon its release next month.
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