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| Home - CEO Spotlight - Jan 03 Issue |
CEO Spotlight: Gary Oliver, Cohesiant
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Sterling-Hoffman: Cohesiant managed to attract financing from top tier investors in one of the worst markets ever. How and why do you think that happened?
Gary Oliver: The opportunity, the vision, and the team. Benchmark and Pequot saw the opportunity to build a great company around providing IT executives with the visibility to make better decisions about IT resources. They have been great partners, and continue to be very supportive of the team.
Sterling-Hoffman: What have the surprises been since taking the CEO role at Cohesiant? What did you NOT expect, coming over from Peregrine?
Gary Oliver: The IT community is under more time and financial pressures than I have ever seen. In some ways, this really plays to our strengths because of our value proposition of helping reduce costs in a very short period of time. At the same time, these organizations are many times just trying to keep above water given reductions in staff and the need to maintain service levels. Time is a very scare resource in today’s IT organizations, but once we have the chance to tell the Cohesiant story, things move quickly.
Sterling-Hoffman: How much of a role does your board play in arranging introductions to CIO’s? Have you found it possible to get on a CIO’s radar WITHOUT a personal introduction? Does this imply that a ‘rolodex’ is critical when hiring a VP Sales?
Gary Oliver: Our board is very active on our behalf and that helps immensely. We’ll take all the intros we can get. On the question of getting appointments with CIO’s, we have a real advantage because most of them have sponsored initiatives around cost take out, license rationalization, or server consolidation.
All else being equal, hire the sales leader with a great rolodex, but don’t trade a rolodex for leadership and a great track record. If the company has a compelling value proposition, a great sales leader will get the appointments.
Sterling-Hoffman: You’re the first CEO we’re featuring in 2003. How about a read on what lies ahead for software startups. Will IT buyers start spending money again?
Gary Oliver: I think it is a great time to be at a technology start up, assuming the company has a straight forward and “must have” value proposition, intense focus on the customer, and the discipline to manage cash burn within realistic growth expectations. Access to talent is plentiful, and commercial real estate costs can’t get much lower. It is a great time to fly under the radar, while the big public companies are just trying to make conservative earnings estimates.
For many IT organizations, the last time they invested heavily in technology was to prepare for Y2K. Much of this technology clearly needs to be refreshed, but before they start spending, most organizations are trying to rationalize and optimize current applications and resources. For example, while many firms have experienced downsizing, they may still be paying maintenance or lease costs for hardware and software that is no longer being used. Some of the applications that supported these downsized business units could be reduced or eliminated. Many organizations have hundreds if not thousands of servers that need to be rationalized and potentially consolidated.
Last year, many IT organizations actually came in well under budget to help contribute to the bottom line of the business or because they had not yet rationalized the current portfolio of IT hardware and apps. Once these processes are in place, IT spending should start to increase at a modest rate.
Angel Mehta is a Managing Director at Sterling-Hoffman, a retained executive search firm that represents venture capital firms and enterprise software companies in VP Sales, VP Marketing, and C-Level recruitment projects. He can be reached via email at: amehta@sterlinghoffman.net. For more information about Cohesiant or Gary Oliver, contact Lerry Wilson: lwilson@cohesiant.com.
 
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