Last week, I said goodbye to my time at the eDJ Group, a company in good hands that will continue to provide top notch eDiscovery and information governance consulting at a level of depth very few can match. This week begins my new adventure as Senior Vice President of Product Marketing and Strategy at X1, and I am very excited about the opportunity.
Many have asked why I chose to join X1 and I want to take this space today to explain the reasons. As an analyst for the past four years, I have had the chance to see – up close and personal – the challenges that enterprise IT and business people are trying to address. One that comes up consistently is the ability to quickly find information in a world where the volume of it is increasing so rapidly. While search might seem relatively simple, I can tell you that many clients pull their hairs out due to frustration with enterprise search deployments.
Thus, the first thing that hit me about X1 was the number of X1 customers whose top point to make about that product is that “it just works.” Business people like the ease of use and clean, single-pane-of glass view of their information, Legal teams like how X1 Rapid Discovery makes eDiscovery more efficient and less costly, and IT teams like that the product can be deployed in increasingly virtualized environments.
Part of the attraction to X1, for me, is the fact that the company can address such a range of solutions via a powerful search engine. It is not just about eDiscovery, though there is a product for that. Rather, X1 will power many solutions by providing easy access to information – and the company does it in a way that just works. It makes me think back to those old BASF commercials – the ones where BASF says, “we don’t make the products you buy, we make the products you buy better.” I get a feeling that same message can apply at X1; something along the lines of “we don’t make the cloud infrastructure, we make the cloud infrastructure better and more valuable.”
Stay tuned for more details on how X1 will make other solutions better and continue to provide great search products in 2014. I’m looking forward to this adventure.