Questions and Answers regarding Hubspan Acquisition – An interview with Liaison CEO Bob Renner
Q: What was the main reason for the merge? What additional value do you think these two companies can bring to the market?
Bob: The executive teams at Liaison and Hubspan developed a mutual respect for one another over the course of the past five years. Our business models and practices, and the way we service our customers, are very similar. We’re both targeting the Global 1000 but with little overlap. Bringing Liaison and Hubspan together doubles the footprint of the markets we serve, and allows our customers to benefit from both companies’ expertise and technology. In addition, Hubspan rounds out Liaison’s ability to deliver managed services across different outlets. For example, Hubspan has done a phenomenal job with managed services for channel partners, while Liaison has delivered managed services direct to customers. The newly combined company delivers world-class managed services direct and to channel partners and provides our prospects, customers and partners with more skill, experience and capabilities.
What are the main advantages that this new solution brings to your target audience?
Bob: Acquiring Hubspan is a boost to Liaison’s Cloud Services Brokerage (CSB) and managed services offerings. Our delivery models for managed services are very similar and consistent. We’re both very high touch and can solve very complex integration problems through managed services. Each company has industry-specific expertise that the other doesn’t have, providing an uplift to what we offer. Liaison’s newly expanded managed services team provides a wealth of integration knowledge garnered over a combined 20 years of managed services experience. Our intention is to combine the diverse disciplines and operational frameworks of both organizations into one world-class, Tier 1 managed services delivery model across a broad set of vertical markets.
Q. Who do you think will be the main user of the services and how will their expectations be met?
Bob: Mid-market companies and large enterprises—from supply chain to consumer products to healthcare, financial services, aerospace and more—with complex data integration requirements can benefit from our Cloud Services Brokerage and integration managed services offerings. Companies that want to take advantage of new cloud services and infrastructures to lower costs or open new business opportunities will benefit from our ability to:
1) make those connections happen quickly;
2) manage connections and services on behalf of our customers; and
3) ensure that the necessary integration takes place correctly.
We meet our customers’ expectations by customizing our Cloud Services Brokerage services and integration managed services to meet their unique business process requirements, as opposed to the more common practice of one-size-fits-all. Furthermore, we back our customized plans with a performance-driven Service Level Agreement (SLA).
Q. How do you view the cloud integration market at the moment and in which directions do you think it could develop?
Bob: Cloud services are maturing and more and more companies see the value in using them to open new lines of business, become more competitive and lower IT costs. Agility is important and companies know they have to be able to jump on business opportunities faster than ever before. That being said, connecting to multiple cloud services and infrastructures can be challenging for many IT departments. Sharing information between multiple cloud services and on-premise applications and systems is even harder. This presents an opportunity for Cloud Services Brokerages and integration managed service providers like Liaison to step in to make those connections, manage them, and take care of all data integration and management issues, freeing IT to focus on solving unique business problems. CSBs excel in accelerating time-to-market objectives by enabling companies to rapidly adopt cloud-based infrastructures and applications and begin benefiting from them very quickly, without incurring capital expenses or further burdening IT. The trend toward cloud services and data-as-a-service is growing quickly, which in turn increases the demand for integration in the cloud.
Q. After the acquisition what do you believe will be your technology advantages over the competition?
Bob: Liaison and Hubspan have both developed a deep understanding of the business processes and integration challenges in specific vertical markets, with little overlap. Our combined company has a much richer base of expertise and technology with which to serve businesses across a broader range of industries, and we plan to offer new services into these verticals. For example, Liaison has long delivered master data management (MDM) to the industries we serve like life sciences and distribution, but now with Hubspan, we have the opportunity to take MDM to the aerospace industry as well as more deeply into the financial services market. Both Liaison and Hubspan have been in the managed services business for more than 10 years and unlike a lot of providers, we have a very proven platform. As customers and partners of all sizes become more sophisticated in their use of cloud-based solutions, items such as up-time and performance SLAs, advanced security, and operational excellence are absolutely mandatory for success—all areas in which we excel.
Together, Hubspan and Liaison offer products and services that address end-to-end integration challenges across application integration (A2A), business process integration (B2B), master data management (MDM), managed file transfer (MFT) and more. The combined company offers in-depth expertise across a variety of industry verticals that enables customers and partners to rapidly and efficiently solve integration challenges. With the acquisition of Hubspan, Liaison is now the largest pure-play cloud integration platform in the market and the only provider with such a breadth and depth of solutions and expertise.
Bob Renner is president and CEO of Liaison Technologies, a global provider of secure cloud-based integration and data management services and solutions. For more information, visit www.liaison.com.
