Four weeks after taking over as the new CEO of E2open Inc., Mark Woodward, in an interview with Managing Automation, said he plans to tighten the company's vertical industry focus, standardize its product offerings, and double the sales force, all with the intent of accelerating growth.
"We're here to take the company to the next level," said Woodward, who recently replaced Greg Clark as CEO. "The company has built a tremendous customer base and done extremely well, but a lot of it has been through word of mouth. It's time to get more aggressive in terms of taking our message out to the market."
Woodward, who ran software development tools provider Serena Software as both a public and private company before joining E2open, said he will also attempt to grow E2open so that it is positioned for a public stock offering if and when markets become receptive.
Woodward's appointment by E2open's board was just one of the recent top-level changes at the company, a provider of on-demand, multi-enterprise supply chain management applications. Before naming Woodward CEO, E2open hired Peter Maloney as its new chief financial officer and Andrew Salzman as chief marketing officer. Maloney came to the company from SaaS provider SNOCAP Inc., where he was CFO. Prior to joining E2open, Salzman was vice president of corporate marketing at Siebel Systems and held a similar role at Compaq Computer.
E2open's new team, Woodward said, plans to double the sales force over the next six months, a step that will help the company expand its global sales efforts. E2open's sales force will be incented, more than in the past, to persuade existing customers to make more extensive use of the company's on-demand offerings, Woodward said. At the same time, the company will extend its current product offerings while increasing its focus on vertical markets, specifically high tech, aerospace, and telecommunications.
While E2open has, for the most part, focused on applications that improve multi-enterprise supply-side collaboration, under Woodward it will also begin to look more at the sell side. Specifically, Woodward said, E2open will roll out tools that help manufacturers understand, forecast, and shape demand.
And E2open, under the new management team, will focus more on standardizing its product offerings, a step that will help it improve its profitability. Historically, Woodward said, E2open has tended to create and deploy applications on a custom basis, particularly for its larger customers, such as Boeing, Hitachi, Seagate, and Vodafone. In the future, he added, E2open will go to market with products that do things like order and inventory management in a more standard way.
Woodward said he hasn't decided yet whether E2open will soon seek additional financing to fund his new initiatives. That will depend on how fast the company wants to grow and how profitable it wants to be. Right now, Woodward said, he's not inclined to sacrifice profitability for growth.
"We would like to be different from other companies in the SaaS market," he said. "Salesforce.com got to $1 billion in revenue before they started making money. That's not our plan. We want to get cash flow-positive much earlier than that."
This article originally appeared in the September 2008 issue of Managing Automation.