CEO Today Magazine April 2020 Edition

18 What does a good pivot entail? In Silicon Valley, ‘pivot’ has now become a buzzword. While there are many success stories, a lot of companies do not make it through. A good pivot is about letting go of the old trajectory of a business and embracing the new direction. Pivot can still have the same end goal, but a company picks a different path, style and approach reach there. A lot of executives in the Technology sector believe that changing the product alone will create a pivot—this is far from the truth. Agood pivot is holistic and practical. It does entail looking at all aspects of the business and aligning them and I could dimension them across Commercial, Operational, Technical, Financial and People as the broad areas to align with each other. Taking one in isolation could create both business and execution risks - it is important to consider everything and base your decisions on data and facts rather than gut feel. It has four primary anchors - Brand, Target Market, Routes to Market and the Product, which I explained earlier. In addition, one should analyze market trends, customer behaviour, competitor behaviour, profit shifts, valuation trends and structural changes in the industry creating headwinds or tailwinds for the business. Adequate consideration should be given to sustaining the pivot or future-proofing the company’s assets, IP and business model to create a structural advantage. It appears that Appnomic has gone through a big pivot. What has changed? Appnomic has indeed gone through a big pivot, we have changed a lot of things. For one, we took a hard look at our assets and decided that we had both technology and talent firepower to pivot into a new category-defining space called self-healing based on AI and Machine Learning. A vision for helping our customers become self-healing attracted top executive talent to our company, including a Chief Revenue Officer and a Chief Marketing Officer to strengthen a very talented executive team. We have changed the product significantly to move it away from the APM space, APM capabilities are now features within the self-healing product rather than being the core of the product. We also moved to a multi-product company by retiring our legacy product called AppsOne and replacing it with a new brand called HEAL. HEAL truly represents what Appnomic does with more pointed value propositions like Heal Cloud, Heal Enterprise, Heal SAP, Heal Edge and Heal Serverless (which is launching soon). We added strength and depth to creating a robust partner ecosystem by adding ISVs, resellers, system integrators and OEM partners to our go-to market capabilities. We also noticed new opportunities with customers in the area of IT operations that legacy players were not addressing, and we decided to grab the opportunity, given our strength in AI and Machine Learning. Why did you decide to pivot? We had four primary reasons to embark on the pivot. • We saw an unmet need in the market which our technology and patents could solve. There were a lot of players talking automation, but no one was addressing the need for autonomous operations and self- healing. When we ran a few rapid tests with prospects, customers and our target market, we saw the energy and enthusiasm for it. We were also able to successfully run a few pilots in this space. The results were very encouraging. • The whole area of AI Ops was quickly becoming a very overused and hyped term in the industry. Everyone from legacy monitoring tools, pure infrastructure players, APM vendors and log analysis folks were all branding themselves as AI Ops and were speaking the same terminology. While they were all addressing parts of the solution, not many were thinking of this holistically. We had an opportunity to partner with some of these players where it made sense to do so and compete with them in a few other areas. We could work along with these solutions to make them self-healing. FRONT COVER FEATURE www.ceotodaymagazine.com “A good pivot is holistic and practical.” Q&A with Nitin Kumar