Interview with Hubspan CEO Trisha Gross, Part I
Posted by Integration Man on September 2, 2009
To set the stage for people who may not be familiar with Hubspan, the Hubspan Connection Blog spent some time with CEO Trisha Gross, who leads the company from our offices in Seattle’s International District. Against the backdrop of the China Town Gate, Trisha spoke about Hubspan’s vision, how the company has evolved and what’s in store for the future. This is part one of a two-part interview. See part 2
Hubspanblog: Tell us when and why Hubspan was founded
Trisha Gross: In 2000, a number of the Hubspan founders were working for a company who was an early entrant into the B2B eCommerce space. Based on our experiences there, we saw a need for a simpler and more cost effective way for businesses to share information – with themselves and with external partners. We realized that companies were becoming less vertically integrated and more horizontally distributed, which created a greater dependency on trusted partners like outsourcers, logistics providers, engineering firms, suppliers and so on.
Within these extended enterprises, companies needed to share more information with a growing number of people and organizations faster than ever before. We saw that while business needs were expanding and becoming more complex, the existing on-premise software-based integration products were not changing and adapting at the same speed and could not provide a cost effective, easily scalable solution.
We saw an opportunity to leverage the emerging Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model to create a highly scalable, real-time, cloud-based integration platform that would eliminate much of the complexities and costs associated with traditional approaches. And that’s how Hubspan was born nine years ago.
Hubspanblog: How should we think about Hubspan today?
Trisha Gross: Today, Hubspan is an integration platform-in-the-cloud, and this creates a very powerful economic advantage for our customers. Because we leverage a SaaS model, we are able to offer low start-up costs and a compelling total cost of ownership. This is because our customers don’t have to buy expensive software and hardware which takes people, time and money to install, configure and tune.
We are finding that companies want to deliver value back to the organization rapidly, but don’t want to break the bank doing so. To meet this need, Hubspan offers a complete solution in the cloud that closely aligns the cost and value curves of integration.
In addition, in the current economic climate, customers tell us that they want to solve a specific business problem (i.e. we need to integrate with our top five customers) and then scale from there at a later point to solve bigger or different problems. Because Hubspan built a single instance, multi-tenant integration platform, we are able to offer a solution that scales over time and can be paid for from our customers’ operating budgets rather than capital expense budgets, which is very attractive to them.
Another aspect of our model that creates advantage for our customers is the notion of community. Each time we complete an integration for a customer, that IP can be reused for the next customer and that has a dramatic impact on time-to-market. With on-premise software, there is no concept of re-use and these companies are not able to capture efficiencies across different customers and pass on the time and cost-savings.
HubspanBlog: How has Hubspan’s vision evolved over the past 8 years?
Trisha Gross: Our vision is and always has been to be recognized as the global standard integration platform for business collaboration. Over the past nine years, we’ve been steadfastly building the company and developing the Hubspan platform by solving problems for our growing customer base. At the same time, we’ve been refining our professional services and customer support processes to ensure the best possible experience for our customers.
We realized that we were on the right track as far as our vision is concerned when industry leaders like VISA, IBM. CBS Content Solutions and SciQuest wanted to partner with us to offer integration solutions to their customers. Today, these partners are an integral part of our business.As far as our product strategy is concerned, we did have to course correct from our initial focus on automating real-time processes when we found that many of our customers had legacy systems in place that could only support asynchronous transactions. We realized that to offer a complete solution we had to support legacy as well as cutting edge technologies. For many of our customers, we became ‘the path to the future’ and we provided them with at least the appearance of being a little more state-of-the-art!
HubspanBlog: What business problems do you solve?
Trisha Gross: We are in the business of automating and integrating business processes. Our customers want to tie their business processes with those of their customers, suppliers, logistic providers, strategic partners, etc. And this goes way beyond simply moving data from point A to point B or providing integration between two applications.
For example, an organization may have business rules that are inherent to their business and internal applications that are in conflict with those of their trading partners. This scenario creates a great deal of complexity when it’s time for these companies to collaborate electronically, because the data must be validated, checked against business rules, reformatted and transformed into the format required by the partner’s system. This can only be done if the platform addresses the challenge at the business process level and not the data level.
The Hubspan platform has been designed from the ground-up to enable companies to extend their business processes to their partners – both in the demand chain and the supply chain and in extended integration communities.
HubspanBlog: How do you go to market today?
Trisha Gross: Traditionally, we’ve gone to market using a direct sales model. However, in the past few years, we’ve been augmenting this with a channel strategy, because of some new developments we’re seeing in the market and because we have technology solution that solves a problem for our partners
First, solution providers (independent software vendors, SaaS offerings, etc.) are increasingly aware that integration is a major obstacle to the adoption of their product or service. In the past, they may have been willing to take on the integration effort themselves, but today they realize that they are much better off partnering with a company who is 100% focused on integration.
The beauty is that because we are a cloud based, multi-tenant integration platform, we can package up a set of capabilities and virtually embed it with our partner’s solution. Our channel partners have realized how important it is not to require their customers to buy and install software and hardware behind the firewall, so the embedded Hubspan solution allows them to eliminate a major objection.
We are also seeing that some of the traditional integration middleware players who have been waiting to see what happens in the SaaS space are starting to make some moves. Selling integration broker middleware to the large market is doable, but many companies (large and mid-sized) cannot consume it based on cost and complexity. Their business problem may simply not be big enough to justify a large capital expense as well as the time and people required. Partnering with Hubspan gives them an alternative solution for these customers.
HubspanBlog: What is your pricing model?
Trisha Gross: For us, it’s all about subscription-based pricing, which allows our customers to align cost and value curves, because they only pay for what they consume. The subscription model is typically based on the number of connections or integration points, not number of transactions, and customers like that because it is predictable. They can budget for it and if they use a little, they pay a little.
Tags: B2B eCommerce, Business Integration, Integration Platform, SaaS, Trisha Gross
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