By SUSAN LAHEY
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

A panel of Austin entrepreneurs talked about the integration of marketing, sales, and software yesterday at a Salesforce event for small business users of the monolithic Customer Relationship Management platform.

Key takeaways included: Just because you can build your own solution doesn’t make it a good idea if it’s not your core business; having all the information regarding customer relationships in one place keeps the sales and marketing departments from killing each other; and having a big, robust CRM saves you from falling through the gaps while you’re scaling.

In essence it was a sales presentation for Salesforce, but one in which Ted Irani, vice president of sales for BP3 Global, Clint Smith, president of CareerPlug, Ryan Deiss, CEO and founder of DigitalMarketer, and Bernard Briggs of Humm Systems, shared a lot of useful information about the perils growing businesses face in managing customer relationships and the solutions that work.

One of these perils is the adversarial relationship often forged between marketing and sales people, because one or the other is blamed for dropping the ball on cultivating and nurturing customers. Deiss described this relationship as “You’re slimy. Well you suck at everything, except logos.” Having the entire customer “journey” in one place, where everyone is required to record all that happens resolves the bulk of this issue, he said, because everyone can see the efforts the others are making and the focus becomes the customer experience.

Irani said BP3 Global uses the data on the system to track how many sales pitches it’s actually winning. When they started, he said, they were winning about 50 percent. But with ongoing iterations in their sales process they got the percentage up to 75 percent within a few months, which helped them decide when it was the right time to add more sales people.

All the organizations said that having a scalable system helped them grow faster than having to move from a spreadsheet to another system, then another, then another.

Smith admitted that he “wrote a big check” earlier this year to get Salesforce implemented and ramped up, a process many small business owners dread because of the time and money that must be diverted from getting product out the door today. Salesforce has reputation for being both complex and expensive, a problem it has tried to solve partly through acquisitions of simpler, more user friendly interface software companies and partly through development of its own, according to Jamie Domenici, vice president of product marketing and SMB marketing.

But all of the entrepreneurs said that, once in place, anyone with a basic understanding of CRM systems—even without coding experience—could make tweaks.

“It’s a line item” Deiss said. “And not even one of the ones I worry about.”

ThousandEyes, a San Francisco-based network intelligence company, announced Wednesday plans to open a sales and customer service office in Austin.

The company also named Victoria Abeling to head up the office as director of corporate sales.

ThousandEyes plans to hire about 30 sales and customer service employees by the end of the year to staff its new Austin office.

“Organizations of all sizes across all verticals are increasingly adopting cloud technologies relying on the Internet for business agility and efficiency, but struggle to maintain visibility into the network infrastructures they don’t own or directly manage. Our highly specialized sales and customer success team in Austin will provide expert support for customers across North America and ensure they get the most value from our Network Intelligence platform,” Anthony Narducci, vice president of sales at ThousandEyes, said in a news release. “As one of the fastest growing tech communities in the country and a key hub for tech talent, Austin is the perfect location for this team. I look forward to working with Victoria to expand ThousandEyes’ success with a high-performing Austin-based team.”

Abeling has 16 years of experience managing sales programs and previously worked for Oracle, VMware and Zenoss.

ThousandEyes’ new office is located in TechSpace at 98 San Jacinto Boulevard in downtown Austin. For information on jobs at ThousandEyes’ Austin office visit its website.

ThousandEyes’ customers include Equinix, ServiceNow, Twitter and eBay.

The company is backed by Sequoia Capital, Sutter Hill Ventures, Tenaya Capital and GV (formerly Google Ventures). It has raised $60.5 million in three rounds of funding, according to its Crunchbase profile.

One of the things Austin is known for is its runners, bikers, hikers, swimmers and endurance athletes looking for the next challenge.

A new site, Thea.com just launched a search engine and events site this week that makes finding that next sporting challenge easier.

Thea.com lists events in the greater Austin area for cyclists, triathletes, runners and more. People can search by type of event or location, race dates and times and other keywords. The site also lists training groups and their schedules and free activities like group rides and runs. And it lets users book a variety of leisure bike tours to explore guided tours of cities and scenic routes across the country.

Efim Gendler and Dennis Lastochkin founded Thea.com in February of 2015.

“The goal with Thea over the next few years is to develop a social marketplace for endurance activities, spanning across the US,” Gendler said in a news release. “It will be the place where athletes and active lifestyle enthusiasts come for information on races, events, trainers, and to connect with one another. Nothing this comprehensive exists presently; and like Austin, I’m sure Thea will continue to evolve and grow. ”

“Thea is a crowd-sourced marketplace so anybody can add a listing. There are also relationships between the listings, for example, between locations and group rides, and training programs. It’s also a wholesale platform that can be white labeled to running stores and bike shops,” Lastochkin said in a news release.

Bike Austin Organization and Violet Crown Sports Association already use Thea.com for organizing their events calendar and to drive greater user engagement.

By TIM GREEN
Special Contributor to Silicon Hills News

In July, after several years of preparation and construction, the Dell Medical School started instruction with its first class of students. The school, students and the Central Texas Community are walking hand-in-hand not only for a medical education, but to change how health care and medicine are done.

Part of the Dell Medical School (DMS) and community interaction involves the Austin startup community. Silicon Hills News talked to Maninder “Mini” Kahlon, vice dean for strategy and partnerships, and Mellie Price, executive director of technology innovation who has been an Austin company founder, CEO, funder and mentor, about how the school intends to engage with the startup community.

The interview has been condensed and edited.

Mini Kahlon: From my perspective, enabling the entrepreneurial community here is very important to us. It’s a model of how academic medicine can relate to an entrepreneurial community so we would hope to learn some lessons to spread to other places.

My biggest success, so far, is the recruitment of Mellie Price into our ecosystem not only because of her own history as an entrepreneur and a CEO but also as an obvious catalyst already in the Austin ecosystem.

Mellie Price: Two programs are helping turn research into health and medical products and services.

The Texas Health Catalyst program helps University of Texas faculty and clinicians affiliated with DMS and Seton Healthcare. It provides consulting and funding of up to $100,000. The first requests for proposals covered comprehensive joint replacement and women’s health.

The catalyst program received 83 proposals from some 30 organizations and a dozen academic institutions.

The other program, The Health Technology Innovation Platform, is an opportunity for DMS to identify companies in various stages of development that are interested in pivoting their product offering or their service offering into value-based care.

What Dell Medical School can provide to startups

MK: Given the expertise not only of the clinical domain but our ability to pull together industry expertise, we will leverage the people who have seen products go to market over and over again within the domain, so they will get feedback on whether these people think that their idea or product has potential or not.

If it does find a match within our care opportunities they get to be tested out within an actual clinical opportunity. That’s a very important de-risking. They can have their product used by leaders in healthcare and in these new models of healthcare. That’s part of what’s new is because we’re interested in products that help drive transformation.

They actually would have proven their value within a real demonstration that includes a real payer (such as an insurer). Other payers will recognize that this was a real implementation with a real payer.

Those things in a real setting that is hard to get especially for those that want to produce products for the future of care and the connection to a sustainable funding model.

MP: The medical school is really at the epicenter of creating these new models of care.

When you move from putting the doctor at the center to putting the patient at the center of all the business processes around that change. All of a sudden you’ve got data inputs and software and things that need to be built that simply don’t exist yet.

It’s health transformation at its root. So our innovation initiative has to encompass not just the traditional creating new molecules for pharmaceutical opportunities and running clinical trials. It’s literally business process re-engineering.

DMS as a catalyst

MK: What we’re working on is catalyzing the growth of health innovation in Austin. Our ideal metrics of success across various domains around health innovation are going to be the growth of this region almost independently of us.

MP: You hear that this is the first medical school to be built in 40-50 years tied to a Tier 1 research facility. But that’s not the cool part.

The cool part is that it’s very likely to be one of the last ones because there’re no major metropolitan areas that don’t have a medical school and those medical schools are beholden to traditional healthcare. It’s extremely difficult to change your revenue model.

We’re the lucky place on the planet that gets to work on this problem and really focus on how do we realign reimbursement incentives so that people are staying healthy longer and if they have to have a surgical episode, we’re reducing re-admissions and improving the outcomes.

It’s literally a once in a lifetime opportunity.

If we can really get that message out to the community as a whole and galvanize the community around the opportunity to get involved. Maybe you’re not a doctor maybe you’re not an entrepreneur but maybe you’re a community leader that can raise awareness in your church or your school about ways to engage with this unique opportunity that we have.

By HOJUN CHOI
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

The culture that Chris Dillie has implemented into his company is simple: be passionate about what you’re doing, and the money will follow.

ESO Solutions, a health data exchange startup, provides software to help ambulance services better monitor their performance, and helps hospitals use that data to improve patient care.

The Austin-based company started in 2004, when Dillie, its CEO, decided to drop his real estate business to follow his passion of helping people in need. Before he began investing in real estate, Dillie served as a volunteer firefighter and an emergency medical service paramedic.

“I really enjoyed helping people,” Dillie said. “At the same time you’re put in situations where you’re forced to think a lot; you’re constantly solving puzzles.”

After spending time as a paramedic, Dillie also worked as a manager of an EMS station, where he was in charge of quality control.

“We had a really hard time knowing how well we were providing services because we didn’t have data,” Dillie said.

It was during this time that Dillie’s real estate business became too large to juggle with the managerial position at the EMS station. However, When John Dadey, who would serve as the president of the company, approached him with the idea of developing what would become ESO Solutions in 2003, Dillie could not resist.

“The reason I left real estate is because this very quickly became my passion,” Dillie said. “I saw what the market could hold and I was really passionate about how our product could change the industry.”

In order to address the gap that Dillie learned of as a manager of a EMS station, ESO Solutions offers software suites that allows for data exchange between hospitals and EMS providers to ensure higher quality care.

From the moment a 911 operator is contacted to provide emergency services, the company’s software tracks what type of diagnosis is made, as well as what types of treatments and medications are given to the patient on-site.

As the patient is passed along to a hospital, the software also helps deliver that data to the hospital to see what mistakes -if any, were made during that process.

Because many hospitals use different types of databases to maintain their patient information, ESO Solutions translates that data into language that can be used by both EMS services as well as hospital systems.

Allen Johnson, the company’s vice president of health data exchange, said that previous forms of monitoring performance was based on a flawed system.

“We were measuring performance of paramedics based off of what we thought was wrong with the patient with no way of being able to tell if our diagnosis was correct in the first place,” Johnson said.

Johnson -who like Dillie, also has a background as a paramedic, said that prehospital ambulance services have changed over the years, making data exchange and analysis more pertinent to quality service.

“I think it’s a maturation of the industry,” Johnson said. “Over the last ten years or so, we went from medical directors being a local person who is nice enough to volunteer to many ambulance services today having directors that are on-site, full time.”

Kenny Schnell, the director of Williamson County Emergency Services, said that his station has used ESO’s data exchange software for three years. He said the software has helped not only the station, but the region that his station serves, manage their performance.

“Paramedics want to know how well they did,” Schnell said. “Getting the outcome data is big, because we want to see if we were on the right page.”

With the outcome data, Schnell said EMS stations can learn how to better educate their paramedics and come up with effective solutions for concentrating time and resources in the areas of care that are lacking.

ESO Solutions has more than 100 employees in the Austin area, and on July 12, announced an investment from Accel-KKR, a private equity firm with a focus in technology. Though the terms of that investment were not publicly disclosed, Dillie said the money will be used towards further developing the company’s software suite, as well as for team expansion.

“Again it’s the culture we have here,” Dillie said. “If you follow your passion, and do what you do passionately, money tends to follow.”

By LAURA LOREK
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

A few years ago, Michael Klug left his job as co-founder and chief technology officer at Zebra Imaging.

At Zebra, Klug worked for 17 years on its dynamic 3D holographic and light-field display products. He helped the company raise money and launch its products.

Klug, who has also worked at the MIT Media Laboratory, was looking for his next challenge. That’s when he joined Magic Leap, a highly stealth technology company. Wired Magazine has called Magic Leap “the world’s most secretive startup.” Magic Leap is creating mixed reality technology that overlays virtual reality onto the real world and although it’s not the only company tackling this technology it is doing the best job, according to the Wired article. And that has helped Magic Leap raise $1.4 billion so far, Wired reports.

Klug, who heads up Magic Leap’s Austin office, will not provide any details on its product other than to say it is aimed at consumers and it will be a wearable device that includes goggles or some kind of glasses and it is transformative technology. On his LinkedIn profile, Klug, who is listed as vice president of advanced photonics for Magic Leap, says he is “constructing a rocket ship for the mind.”

Magic Leap has applications in gaming and entertainment, but it is also looking to tackle personal computing and communications. Its wearable device seeks to become something we rely on as much as our cell phones and if it’s done right, it will become a normal part of our everyday lives. That’s why Magic Leap could become the next big transformative technology company.

Magic Leap is creating technology that is going to change the way we work, live and play, said Barbary Brunner, president of the Austin Technology Council.

“It’s about blurring the lines between the virtual and the real either partially or completely,” Brunner said. “This is a technology that once it’s perfected is going to impact every part of our lives.”

On Wednesday morning, Magic Leap officially opened its 23,000 square foot Austin office, which includes 5,000 square feet of clean room space. The clean room space gives off a strange orange glow and makes Magic Leap’s operations look all the more mysterious. Signs posted around the office warn visitors not to take photos. But through the windows, visitors can see workers dressed in white “bunny suits” working on components of Magic Leap’s product. The office currently has 40 employees but the company is hiring and plans to expand.

“Obviously, Austin is really critical for us. The most significant R&D and manufacturing setup is happening right here,” said Brian Wallace, chief marketing officer with Magic Leap. “As with all things with Magic Leap I can’t say to the public exactly what we are doing here. We have some of the best and brightest minds literally in Austin right now helping to bring Magic Leap’s vision to the world.”

The main manufacturing operations will be in Plantation, Florida, in an old Motorola plant, Klug said. The Austin operations grew out of Magic Leap’s original office, a garage belonging to Zebra Imaging in Pflugerville. That’s where Klug worked with a few other people. Magic Leap’s operations are based in Dania, Florida, just outside Fort Lauderdale. But Klug didn’t want to leave Austin. And that’s how the Florida-Texas Magic Leap connection began. Magic Leap also has a software office in Mountain View, California.

Magic Leap’s Austin office is located at 9801 Metric Blvd. on the opposite end of a shared building with Zebra Imaging.

Congressman Michael Thomas McCaul, R-Austin, attended the event Wednesday. Previously he toured the facility in Florida and was blown away by Magic Leap’s technology, he said.

“3D virtual technology…basically living in that space,” McCaul said. He is chairman of the U.S. House of Representative’s homeland security committee and he’s on the science, space and technology committee as well. He wanted to attend the Magic Leap office opening to show his support for what they do, he said. It’s a $10 million investment and it’s creating tech jobs in Austin, McCaul said.

There is a wide range of national security applications for Magic Leap’s technology, McCaul said.

To some it may be surprising to have one of the next big things in tech being created outside of Silicon Valley. But having a skunk works operation based in Florida does have some roots in computer history. In fact, Boca Raton is where a group of IBM engineers fled from the New York IBM headquarters to create the IBM PC, which debuted in 1981.

So when will Magic Leap introduce its transformative mixed realty products? The only thing the company would say is soon.

Austin-based Magnitude Software announced Tuesday plans to buy Simba Technologies, a data and analytics firm.

The terms of the deal were not disclosed.

“This acquisition furthers our strategic vision to enable enterprise-wide visibility and insights for corporate performance management,” Chris Ney, Chairman & CEO of Magnitude Software, said in a news release. “As data heterogeneity expands exponentially, so does the complexity of connectivity challenges that Simba can help solve, accelerating our ability to put data into the hands of business users.”

Simba Technologies provides data access between front-end applications and back-end data sources. Its customers include Microsoft Corp.

“We are thrilled to become part of the Magnitude Software family,” Amyn Rajan, CEO of Simba Technologies said in a news release. “Simba perfectly complements the existing Magnitude Software solutions, allowing for connectivity to more diverse applications and a wide array of data environments.”