We caught up with Samir Saluja, who we’ve covered before when he started DeriveOne about his new venture, Ahrian LLC.

Marketing Darwinism:  Tell us about Ahrian, your new firm.

Samir:  Thanks Paul.  Ahrian is a boutique consulting firm that will take on a limited number of deep customer partnerships this year.  We work on audience development, innovation and innovation processes, channel empowerment, and market development.  Underpinning these concepts is data, research, and technology.  I’m as excited about Ahrian as I have been about anything else professionally.

Marketing Darwinism: Ahrian – great name.  Tell us more.

Samir:  Well, I must admit, Ahrian is the name of my son.  Just as he’s the light of my full life, this company is the light of my work life.

Marketing Darwinism: You were at Microsoft for a long time.  How does your experience there inflect your work at Ahrian?

Samir:  At Microsoft, I was surrounded by really driven, smart people who thought about speed and scale.  When I co-founded DeriveOne, we wanted to combine speed and scale with actionable insights for companies that were seeking outside help to validate hypotheses and understand their customers, and then with our Project Simile joint venture we have been applying recent advances in machine learning to help customers measure metaphor resonance for brand and communication strategies. With Ahrian, I am synthesizing all my past experience- even my experience in International Trade, to bring to bear the entire panoply of services to my customers.

Marketing Darwinism: You openly say that you aren’t seeking any and all customers, just the right ones.  In fact you call these customer partnerships.  Please walk us through that logic.

Samir:  Deep relationships are partnerships and the only way to truly serve customers is my discovering, exploring, and building together.  I do not want to add only a thin-layer of value but to be considered a real team member, just with a different email address.  Without that depth, you miss context and nuance and without complexity and attending to nuance, you cannot create lasting products and solutions.  Ahrian is my ode to that concept.

Marketing Darwinism: Are you focusing on particular verticals?

Samir:  Yes and no.  We do a lot of work with technology companies and with their ecosystem.  We also work with Fintech and other adjacent areas.  We do so from the vantage point of data-driven growth combined with wisdom and experience.  Ahrian is a prescriptive company but never is it implied that we know better, only that we have an alternative point of view that should be considered.  That has resonated very well in these sectors and will hopefully elsewhere as well.

Marketing Darwinism: What are you most excited about?

Samir:  Building a true boutique firm.  A McKinsey of sorts without the baggage and overhead.

Second, I want to be friends with all my customer partners.  It’s not worth doing if you can’t enjoy your time with people.  If the pandemic has taught us anything it is that life is short, and all solutions start with investing time in people that inspire and fulfill you personally and professionally.

Marketing Darwinism: Steven, it’s been a while since we caught up but I know you are doing something very interesting and relevant now. Can you tell us about your new project?

Steven: Thanks. The last 15 years have been very interesting for me and have culminated in the new stealth startup I’m building. As you know, I cofounded Ascentium and we grew it from zero to 90M in a little less than 7 years. Our entire focus was technology in context and a relentless focus on customer needs. We build the entire company around the customer in our “surround” strategy. When we sold it, I moved into an area that always fascinated me- hospitality, where I partnered with some of the most incredible technical talent to build and nurture systems for hotels, casinos, and other hospitality ventures. My new startup is connected to that space.

Marketing Darwinism: Isn’t the timing for that, well, awkward given the 80% decline in hotel stays and the pandemic situation in general.

Steven: On the surface, yes. But when you dig deeper, you see that when the industry recovers- even if not 100% or even close- it will need flexible systems that can elastically throttle up and down. In addition, as assets get repurposed and value is derived from new modes of business, the currently rigid systems will have to flex. That’s the key to a post- Covid 19 scenario.

Marketing Darwinism: Fascinating. When you talk about repurposing, in some ways that is the key. Transformation, Pivoting, Repurposing….these are buzzwords. Is there something more to them?

Steven: It’s a great point. For many, the “pivots” they’ve announced are hardly interesting. I mean going from serving a sandwich in a closed environment to offering it for pick-up is necessary but not super-innovative. But imagine converting a hotel into a hospital or into temporary work space? Imagine a physical business that transforms itself into a digital, ether-based business. These are the sorts of things that deeply vertical solutions will have to accommodate going forward.

Marketing Darwinism: So, given that, what is your focus now?

Steven: We start with the customer. Customers have been telling me for a long time that they need modular solutions that allow them to scale up and down and don’t require a complex and impacted process or culture curve to adopt. My goal as a technology builder is to start with these needs, to deeply contextualize myself in the culture, and only then to architect the technology. So, as we launch, we will be sure to continue to give you, Paul, the exclusive insight into our plans!

Marketing Darwinism: Steven, how does Marketing fit into your new startup’s plans?

Steven: I’ve always been a big believer in Marketing. All effective companies must communicate clearly and often, and I believe Marketing is the key here. Products are great to build but they can “sit on the shelf” without an effective strategy to win influential people to avail of their benefits. While I am a technologist in the first instance, I am a Marketer in the second; I’ve never built a company without a superb Marketer in the first 3 hires.

Marketing Darwinism: Any thoughts about the future of hospitality and hotels?

Steven: I believe that the industry will find its footing. While we cannot say that this pandemic came out of nowhere, it certainly caught many industries flat-footed. But in the past 2 months I’ve seen story after story of positive transformation – as I alluded to before- and have seen that the entire ecosystem that supports the industry is ready to retool. As such, I think that our job as technologists is to enable and accelerate the processes by which this reinvention takes place. I don’t necessarily believe we’ll be back to the “glory days,” but I’m clear that the new scenario will not be as bleak as was thought in the first waves of this pandemic. Success will be had again!

Marketing Darwinism caught up with Kathy Visser-May, CMO of Acumatica, the world’s fastest growing Cloud ERP company. Kathy is a celebrated Marketer with experience traversing technology giants like Microsoft and PeopleSoft/Oracle and hyper-growth companies like Acumatica. Recently, she was named a CRN 2018 Woman in the Channel.

MD: Kathy, tell us a bit about Acumatica. We hear about the torrid growth. Any color you can add?

Kathy: Thanks Paul. Acumatica is focused on helping mid-size companies transform their business with a modern system that grows as they grow. The most forward-thinking companies are disrupting themselves to ensure they continue to be the architects of their future. This trend is affecting all industries, it doesn’t matter if you build buildings, manufacture auto parts, sell shoes online; disruption is happening, requiring companies to change how they operate and provide value to customers. As a result, the requirements of a mid market business to be competitive today are as complex as large enterprises were 10 years ago.

We have built a flexible, powerful, and secure platform that offers them speed and scale and connects their business in an end-to-end way. The growth is testament to the quality of the product and our unique licensing and deployment models that enable customers to scale as their business grows.

MD: You emphasize the Channel a great deal at Acumatica. Is it true that you are a 100%- Through-Channel company?

Kathy: For us, the Channel is our lifeblood. These amazing companies sell to and service customers with a deep understanding of their business needs across many industries and geographies. I like to say we don’t compete with our channel, we feed it. My team spends 50%+ of our resources and marketing dollars on creating high quality sales leads for our partners. Partners tell me all the time one of the reasons, in addition to our modern, cloud solution, they love selling Acumatica is because of our commitment to this model. We provide the Channel not only with technical knowledge but sales and implementation support as well. Such harmony is unheard of typically. So, yes, we are 100% Channel.

MD: You mentioned Digital Transformation. What does this mean specifically in the Acumatica context?

Kathy: We love the phrase Digital Transformation but are also aware of its shortcomings. For many businesses, the phrase implies something arcane and something “other” than what they are doing. But when you inspect the issue, ask the right questions, and find out that these very organizations are migrating to the cloud, digitizing process, and unifying Business and IT, you realize that they are in fact doing Digital Transformation. In our conception, it’s about two things: Operations and Customer Experience. We help Medium-sized companies operate in a manner that allows them to spend their energies engaging with customers and conferring that constantly-improving experience that their rightfully demanding customers ask for. The core concept of the DX journey is that the system at the center of the business must be one that is capable of housing the data needed across the business operations and the ability to provide real-time data and connection across all systems. Systems that house islands of data that have to be synchronized and reconciled are no longer effective in the modern world.

MD: ERP can at times seem “old hat.” What about emerging technologies?

Kathy: There are a few things embedded in this question. For some, the idea of ERP might seem to be yesterday’s news but for growing companies seeking to improve their engagement and experience, ERP can very well be a fresh and new way to approach their business. We are adaptable, flexible, and natively Cloud-based not cumbersome and laborious to implement. Interestingly, emerging technologies, especially AI, are a core pillar of our business. 75% of our resources are technical and we never have and never will stop engineering new products that transform how businesses operate and deliver value to customers.