Solver Celebrates 20 Years: Executive Interview, Part 2
Before the holidays, we sat down with CEO Nils Rasmussen, COO Corey Barak, CIO Hadrian Knotz, and CTO Mike Applegate to discuss 20 impactful years of being a leader in the Business Intelligence (BI) industry. This is the second in a series, where the executive team members discuss the future of Solver and BI360 in terms of product innovation, customer and partner relationships, and the organization as a whole.
What’s on the horizon for Solver and BI360?
Nils Rasmussen: Well, it’s always exciting to look into the future for us. The near future is very clear, as Mike was talking about earlier. It’s clear, but full of clouds, if you can understand that. In the near future, we’re going to the cloud with our product, wherever our customers are in the world – and wherever our partners. It will be a whole new experience, and we look forward to that. In the long run, looking forward 5-10 years, beyond just product innovation, where we have lots and lots of exciting plans, it’s also about innovating Solver as an organization. Today, we have 11 locations around the world, and that’s certainly going to evolve and grow to an even larger global family to service partners and customers wherever they are.
What will the impact be for Solver’s customers and employees?
Mike Applegate: As a whole, certainly things are changing as we move, especially to the cloud service. I think our customers will have more options; our partners will have more options. Internally, we have continued to evolve the organization, and we have a strong focus on culture in our organization. Being a cloud provider is certainly a popular topic, and I think it’s something that everyone at the company is excited about.
Corey Barak: I think it also allows us to innovate a lot more than we have before. We have done innovation from a development side, from an implementation side, from creating templates, but now that we’re in the cloud, it gives us more of a chance to have a lot more innovation from every area of Solver, including globally, but our support team, our dev team, our consulting team, sales, marketing – everyone at this company should be able to innovate and find ways to innovate.
Hadrian Knotz: One other thing I’d like to add about that, too, is that with the new product being cloud-focused, we are not leaving the people who only have on-prem behind. We have an on-premises version that’s going to continue to work for some time. That hybrid approach is something that many people find very valuable because they’re not ready to jump to the cloud on day one. They can start on-premise, they can go to the cloud, they can move slowly as the organization is ready.
Rasmussen: Maybe I can tag on there that, because it is our 20th anniversary, the way that we see that Solver has evolved is not only to a corporate family, where we really look forward to meeting our friends in the company on a Monday morning, but also a global family with now friends not only in other Solver locations around the world and great colleagues, but over the years, we have also developed great relationships with many, many of our partners. Deep, deep relationships, great trust – and the same with many of our customers. So, as we look forward to the next 20 years, those things are, for us, just as important as a great, innovative product. It’s that people aspect of the business because business is not just software and technology. It’s very much alive, and it’s about human beings – we appreciate that at Solver.
Solver enables world-class decisions with BI360, a leading web-based CPM suite made up of budgeting, reporting, dashboards, and data warehousing, delivered through a web portal. Solver is reinventing CPM with its next generation solution. BI360 empowers business users with modern features including innovative use of Excel in the model design process. If you’re interested in learning more, our team is excited to hear about your organizational needs and goals.
