Coherent CEO John Brisco came to Lisbon’s Web Summit to talk about how different organizations are now using his company’s software to manage their data and make informed decisions.
Coherent Spark converts spreadsheets into ready-to-integrate APIs. Today, most of Coherent’s corporate customers are insurance and financial companies, but it is seeing growing sales from other industries — especially those undergoing digital transformation.
Coherent teams up with several channel partners, VARs, and managed service providers to market the products and integrate Coherent’s software into their platforms.
To learn more about the market for data automation and acceleration of speed to market, we talked to Brisco.
The Channelist: John, thank you very much for your time.
First, can you tell us about your company? What are your offerings, and how do you see the market now, especially after all the adjustments during the pandemic?
John Brisco: Coherent is the world leader in turning spreadsheets into code, and the reason we do that is nearly every enterprise on Earth uses spreadsheets, but to transform data as well, as we have businesses operate, there’s never been a way to convert all those spreadsheets into code.
So we’ve principally focused on financial services across multiple geographies: Asia, Europe, and the United States. People use our SAS platform to change all spreadsheets into code. It’s an offering quickly being adopted across multiple insurers and banks.
But we’re seeing people trying to think about ways to do things faster and more efficiently, which is feeding our business and our growth. And therefore, when you’re talking about the market conditions at the moment and reality, we’re still seeing that enterprises are looking for technology that will make them faster, smarter, and more intelligent.
The Channelist: Now, about your channel and how you work with your channel partners. Do you foster indirect sales of your products, and at the same time, are you working with people in the same ecosystem to sell with other companies?
John Brisco: Our partnership and channel strategy are essential to our business because, given that we are global and also we believe we’ll be moving from financial services to other industries, having channel partners is critical to our success.
So we have a very channel-distribution mix. We have our own direct sales channel, but we have solid partnerships in the reseller channel. From a partnership-channel point of view, we work with some of the largest consultancies and SAS firms, such as Ernst & Young, Deloitte, and Capgemini.
But we’ve also developed a software ecosystem partnership where we work with various major players and integrate our technology seamlessly into theirs. An example is we’re natively integrating into Snowflake, the fastest-growing cloud database solution in the world. If you want to turn your spreadsheets into Snowflake, you use Coherent.
And system integrators, we work with them in targeting accounts and industries to enable that capability to come to life.
The Channelist: What about MSPs, such as those working with Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, or Amazon AWS. What do they need to do to enhance their offerings with products like yours?
John Brisco: I think, from a managed-service-provider perspective, I’m still a big believer they are a critical enabler for enterprises worldwide. There are talent shortages across enterprises, and managed service providers are crucial to plug the resource gap.
But they are also fueling many transformations, which organizations need to do. By utilizing our technology, managed service providers can do a lot of work for clients faster and more efficiently, but also enable some complexity to be overcome in a new way.
So we’re working with various managed service providers who realize that our solution can help them offer greater value propositions and, therefore, for them to be very successful in what they do to their clients.
The Channelist: It looks like you are mainly working in markets such as financial and insurance, already using digital tools such as cloud computing. What about traditional industries now going through digital transformation?
John Brisco: I think the way forward is cloud-enabled capabilities and more software as a service for digital transformation happening faster, but also being more nimble because the biggest challenge organizations have is they don’t have five years to do it. Competition is there all the time, and they need to be able to improve on digitization continuously. Otherwise, they’ll lose customers and market share and won’t achieve what they want.
My message when I’m speaking with executives across multiple industries and multiple regions is to start thinking a little bit differently about how you’re going to tackle your transformation, some of the problems you want to fix, and, therefore, what are some of the technologies which will solve that problem.
But it also enables them to have a modern technology architecture moving forward because the worst mistake you can make is spending millions of dollars on a technology that becomes obsolete shortly. We constantly release new features, new capabilities, and innovations. And therefore, you have to be able to adapt to those technologies.
The Channelist: Thank you for your insightful comments.
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