Interview with Hubspan CEO, Trisha Gross, Part 2
Posted by Integration Man on September 24, 2009
To set the stage for people who may not be familiar with Hubspan, the Hubspan Connection 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 in the future. This is part two of our interview. Click here to read the first part
Hubspan Connection: What was an important development in the last year (for your industry), and how will it affect Hubspan’s future strategy?
Trisha Gross: The big development this year was the coming of age of cloud computing. Everyone is talking about the cloud and more and more applications are moving to the cloud, and more specifically, to solutions delivered as software as a service (SaaS) every day. While some companies still have reservations, the economic advantages offered by SaaS is overcoming their concerns. Of course, current economic challenges are also a major driver for people to adopt solutions that drive down costs and increase revenue.
The other thing we are seeing is the evolution of the idea of the platform. Just like SAP, Oracle and SalesForce.com evolved into a platform play, we are starting to see cloud-based platforms, and this creates a need for integration with those platforms which, of course, creates new opportunities for us.
Hubspan Connection: What changes are you seeing in the business integration space and how is Hubspan responding?
Trisha Gross: The main thing we are seeing is that organizations are not taking on “world peace” kind of projects. Instead, they are trying to solve very narrowly defined problems, such as, “I need to be able to give my top five clients electronic access to my eCommerce site”, or “I need to be able to get estimated delivery times from my logistics provider.” Also, there is a requirement for a faster time to value, so they need to be able to solve these problems and return a positive ROI to their company within three to six months.
Clearly, there is no way they can do that with on-premise software. No one has the appetite for a 12 to 24 month payback period or a lengthy and complicated implementation project.
So, what we are finding is that people are behaving differently, because they have to be focused and intelligent about solving specific problems. Hubspan is incredibly well positioned to offer a cost-effective solution with a rapid time-to-market that addresses their immediate and long-term needs.
Hubspan Connection: What areas of innovation is Hubspan focused on right now?
Trisha Gross: Hubspan has a proud history of innovation over the past few nine years. We were one of the first companies to build a secure, scalable and reliable multi-tenant software-as-a-Service integration platform, and today our customers are taking advantage of our innovations in the software, infrastructure and services layers.
Right now, we are very focused on building out capabilities in the Hubspan platform that enables our partner strategy around partner-specific communities as well as self service capabilities for our partners. Also, Hubspan has always led the way with cloud security, and we are continuing to add advanced security features, both related to our ongoing PCI Compliance efforts as well as our overall capabilities around data protection, identity management and infrastructure security.
Hubspan Connection: What will drive the next round of innovation in the integration space?
Trisha Gross: We believe that the need to drive the cost and time of integration down to a very low point will create a situation where companies will be able to access and use pre-built integration modules that reside in the community. Community members will be able to decide whether or not to make their components publically available. For example, a company will be able to browse a list of Web services and decide to use the Barnes & Noble.com Punchout module without having to interact with the Barnes & Noble.com or Hubspan teams at all.
Hubspan Connection: What’s the impact of the current economic climate on Hubspan?
Trisha Gross: In spite of, or maybe because of, what is happening in the economy, it is an exciting time for Hubspan right now for a number of reasons. First, companies are focused on projects that allow them to get closer to their customers – they are trying to raise the barriers to entry for competitors and find new ways of delivering value. Because Hubspan allows them to draw from their operational budget and be tightly tied to their customers, they are giving these projects the green light.
Also, people are being smarter about the projects they are tackling. They realize that they can’t boil the ocean, so they are starting small and growing. Our solution easily scales up to solve complicated problems and scales down to address specific point problems.
Finally, the growing trend towards cloud-based applications and platforms is creating a huge opportunity for us to sell a cost-effective, fast-time-to-market solution directly to end customers in addition to being embedded in partner solutions.
Tags: Business Integration, CEO, Cloud-Based Platform, Hubspan, SaaS
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