After nearly 6 years at AXS-One I have joined Awarepoint, the company driving real tangible value for RTLS (Real-time Location Systems) in acute care for Health and Hospitals, as its Vice President of Product Management.
You can read Awarepoint’s announcement of my appointment here.
I am extremely excited, humbled, and, candidly, torn by this opportunity.
In early 2003, Andy Typaldos, Elias Typaldos and Gerry Vendome the co-founders of AXS-One (formerly Computron Software) and the then current CEO John Rade all took a chance on me. I was a former IT executive (or Chief Bottle Washer) who left the corporate world several years prior to join the dot-com ranks of start-ups and entrepreneurs - after several ventures in management consulting, e-commerce and storage management I was a storage and long-term archive evangelist and spent most of my time advising companies, governments and some academia types on how to keep electronic data around and readable for a very, very, very, very long time, I was also doing some work with various start-up ventures helping them to differentiate their products for the US storage market.
With more prior background in both the legal and financial services sectors, at AXS-One they gave me the chance to develop a new business venture for enterprise scale archival, compliance and legal discovery within a publicly traded 40Mil dollar a year co. and steer it where it needed to go in order to grow a new world wide software business.
Those years have been the best years of my career, working with great people who have pushed me to work harder, become smarter, and do better. I was very fortunate to be in the middle of a number of industry inflection points around storage, huge data volumes, search, compliance and legal discovery where we were able to continually invent and build great software that “killed the competition” and served our target customers needs, some before they or even the industry knew they needed it. That’s real magic.
It’s not every day that you get a chance to build new products in a newly emerging software category and go head-to-head competitively with IBM, EMC, Symantec, and a few other billion dollar entities, and beat them to the punch regularly. Our early success drove a 1200% increase in the company’s stock value, and drove new successive wins, quarter over quarter, with Blue Chip accounts and quarter over quarter profitability.
And although I've been very fortunate to help the company to grow, I also had a chance to experience first-hand its down-slide, another type of learning experience that you don’t pick up in business school.
A US economic down-turn that affected nearly every business and that combined with some poorly executed management decisions by a newly hired CEO eventually took a highly successful nearly 300 person company with employees and customers in over 15 countries and a market cap that we grew from 12mil to nearly 100mil to become an acquisition candidate in the fire-sale category - and while it may have been nice to roll-up my sleeves and prove that it can be done all over again, the cheese had moved and I realized it was time for change.
I reached out to several friends and business contacts to solicit their help in re-joining the likes of the bigger companies (Microsoft, Cisco, a couple of big investment banks, EMC, EDS/HP, Sun/Oracle etc.) and I was all but ready to pull the trigger on another Chief Bottle Washer opportunity when I received a call from Awarepoint, a company that I was already working with as an advisory board member, and they were growing and looking to expand in several areas.
As a member of their advisory board I was already impressed with the caliber of their people and their tremendous value proposition, products and overall market strategy.
Well, after meeting with them further I felt right at home, these are bright, driven people and I was primed and ready to join them in whatever capacity would work best for the company, so here I am the newly hired VP of Product Management. It is an opportunity to expand my experience and to work on some really hard and varied problems; it's also the opportunity to work again with some fantastic people.
As the Vice President of Product Management, I am tasked with aligning the company's strategic goals with the delivery of consistently great products, the optimization of day-to-day product management, and extending Awarepoint's market leadership position. Some of these things are very familiar to me; others like being a new vertical industry aren't. That's precisely the challenge I feel I need!
I will remain living in Charlotte but will commute regularly to San Diego, where most of the Awarepoint executives are based.
A big thanks, to all of my friends and business contacts who were ready to help me re-join one of those big companies again, and I won't think less of you for leaving your cushy corner office and join me and a great team in helping to build the next billion dollar company...
Peter Mojica, VP Product Management | pmojica@awarepoint.com
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