Liaison Technologies is a cloud-based integration and data management solutions company that helps enterprises overcome the complexities of on-premise middleware. For example, Liaison utilizes a cloud-based approach to break down data silos in order to tap into valuable information that is needed to make better decisions. Liaison was founded in 2000 and now has over 7,000 customers in 46 countries with offices in the United States, the Netherlands, Finland, Sweden, the United Kingdom and Singapore. To learn more about the Liaison Technologies, I interviewed CEO Bob Renner.
Renner told me his educational background is electrical engineering studies and that was followed by an MBA several years later. "The shift to an MBA came several years after I transferred from Cal Poly, where I was pursuing an MSEE, for a new job in the Southeast. I realized that business principles are easier than differential equations and necessary to bring good technical ideas to life in the market," said Renner in the interview. "I spent many years designing and implementing large scale IT architectures and programs, so I jumped at the opportunity to move this experience into a business with a very ambitious technical and entrepreneurial vision."
The idea for Liaison Technologies came together "during the Golden Age of IT Enlightenment around the year 2000, followed by the inevitable correction affectionately known as the 'Dot Bomb,'" Renner pointed out. At that time, Renner created the business plan that became Liaison Technologies.
The idea for the company at the time was to take enterprise solutions for integration, data management, etc. to an inter-enterprise scale. This approach broke barriers and silos separating data and facilitated pre-competitive collaboration and multi-tenant applications like never before.
Renner said he was a relatively young professional at the time and was a bit overwhelmed by the attention and funding the idea received. The industry experts and financial analysts valued the business plan at more than $1 billion and the early stage funding of more than $100 million was quickly secured. “I took the best role in the company as the first employee, Chief Technology Officer, but I was demoted to Chairman and CEO less than two years later,” Renner quipped.
Even though the economic conditions seemed favorable, it made resources scarce and made time-to-market the enemy. However, the market had corrected in 2002 and Renner pointed out that it was back to business and rational thinking once again prevailed. Renner said that in many ways, the real process of building Liaison started two years into the company’s journey.
From that point forward, Liaison focused on the customer and what the customers would give permission to do for them. “As it turned out, this started with ‘data plumbing,’ and that was a big and messy job that TIBCO, webMethods, IBM and others had not really addressed on an inter-enterprise scale. The EDI Value Added Networks, which were inter-enterprise, were mainframe-based, old, slow and rigid. Finally, we at Liaison had our ‘white space,’ found our footing and began to build a business around technology innovation, which is my passion, to address a real and unmet business need,” Renner recalled.
Liaison innovated its platform in increments between 2003 to 2013. Around that time, the company rebuilt its platform from scratch.
“This was another step in our evolution as a business that our competition simply could not respond to because they were publicly traded, heavily debt-financed and owned by conservative private equity funds that focused on expanding near-term profits or simply did not have the will and courage to turn their business upside down,” Renner explained candidly. “From 2013 to 2015, Liaison Technologies embarked on an amazing path of reinvention that culminated in the launch of our fully micro-services-based ALLOY Platform in 2015. Early adopters from all industry segments — from healthcare to financial services — joined the program, and by 2016, the platform reached general availability and now boasts more than 50 large enterprises in full production on the ALLOY Platform, supporting a wide variety of use cases.”
In the interview, I asked whether Renner could share any specific customer success stories. He cited a global life sciences company specializing in aesthetics and neurotoxins that had a diverse customer pool and sourcing methods that resulted in the creation of two segregated software and data management systems that could not interface. One was a CRM product that tracked the sales team and healthcare provider data and the other was a separate ERP system used for order and billing tracking.
Fortunately, the Liaison ALLOY Platform offers a valuable Customer Integration Management (CIM) solution thanks to its microservices architecture, which can quickly and economically scale to unify diverse data systems. It ensured full visibility of the company’s customer identities and this was achieved four months in advance of anticipated deadlines. Thanks to the business intelligence of ALLOY, the unified data allows the sales teams to upsell and cross-sell customers for more revenue. And the managed-services aspect of ALLOY frees up resources that were previously wasting time trying to determine the needs and preferences of customers.
Another customer success story was a parent company to 14 ecommerce retail brands, which required a single tokenization solution to handle the large volume of sensitive ecommerce transactions across their various retail brands. That company chose ALLOY to “leverage an advanced microservices architecture because it provides the sophisticated tokenization capabilities needed to safeguard sensitive data, including credit card information with the speed, performance, and reliability required to ensure no disruption in the customer experience.” The implementation was reliable that the company is moving a former on-premises tokenization solution to the cloud in order to leverage the reliability and performance provided by ALLOY. As a result, performance has improved nine-fold.
Liaison has raised around $200 million in funding thus far and the company is “solidly profitable.” In fact, the company has a record year in 2017 on the strength of ALLOY Platform sales, which grew by a triple-digit percentage year-over-year.
I asked Renner what distinguishes Liaison Technologies from its competition. And he said “most of their competition focuses on providing developer productivity tools, a narrowly defined iPaaS market, for example, whereas our experience has shown that companies want to look past building or rebuilding point data integrations. So, trading in a 15-year-old TIBCO solution, for example, for a five to 10-year-old MuleSoft ESB is moving to a different vendor, but it’s also taking the same exact approach and will result in the same exact problems.” Liaison’s ALLOY Platform was built exclusively to address the complex and changing integration and data management needs of the enterprise through a single solution. Liaison invested $30 million over three years to develop ALLOY from the ground up.
What are some of Liaison Technologies’ future company goals? “We have put the vast majority of the company’s energy behind our ALLOY Platform and continue to believe that our technology and new approach provides companies the best way to execute their ‘Digital Transformation’ strategy,” Renner concluded. “We look forward to helping enterprises in all industries innovate, disrupt their markets, bring new business models to life and do what they do best via actionable insight gained from their data. ALLOY releases data from silos, facilitates better integration and enables superior data management. The company’s goals include actively rolling out the platform and enhancing its capabilities based on customer feedback.”
