With all the talk lately about fiscal cliffs and stagnant employment, it’s clear that we are still in the midst of one of the worst recessions in our recent history. Volatility and uncertainty still dominate the global economic landscape, and it would have seemed natural to take the route that many organizations have taken during this time – which is to hunker down with the employee base and investments they have, and to freeze any further investment – whether in more people or technology – until the storm clears.
But, as Kai Gong, AvePoint’s Chairman and Co-CEO, tells us all the time: “Nothing in business comes naturally.” Our recent honor on being named an Inc. magazine’s Hire Power Awards winner is further evidence of AvePoint confidently taking calculated risks and challenging traditional thinking. The Inc. Hire Power Awards recognize American companies that have generated the most jobs in the past three years. From 2008 to 2011, AvePoint’s US-based employee base increased 113 percent. In just this past year alone, US job growth for AvePoint has risen an additional 47 percent, which is outpacing our global job growth in the same time period by 16 percent.
So why is this important? There is a tremendous uptick in adoption of social enterprise collaboration technologies such as Microsoft SharePoint, which itself is now a $2 billion/year business, according to Microsoft. With this increase in adoption, and subsequent evolution in how enterprise collaboration platforms are used by organizations worldwide, the sheer amount of data stored is absolutely exploding. So much so, in fact, that Gartner Research estimates that enterprise data will grow 650 percent by 2015.
With this explosion in data come several challenges, all of which explore the dichotomy between collaboration and security:
1. Managing all of this unstructured data.
2. Mitigating privacy, security, and accessibility violations associated with the data.
3. Ensuring social enterprise collaboration platforms – no matter what they are or where they’re located – are optimized to allow just that, collaboration, among its distributed employee-base.
In short, AvePoint is in the business of enabling enterprise collaboration with confidence. This is not only a business need, but also a technical challenge that we are finding with all of our 10,000-plus customers worldwide today. As such, we have a mission to ensure that every aspect of our business is ready to meet and exceed the demands from our current customer base and the marketplace at large, including but not limited to:
· Our global, 24/7 customer support team which has a customer satisfaction rating of 99 percent
· Our product and R&D teams, which support more than 40 products today and are also continuing to create new products and solutions to enable collaboration with confidence.
· Our sales, marketing, and business development teams, in order to help as many organizations benefit from our products and solutions as possible.
Our ongoing investment in our people, processes, and technology has continued to bear fruit – showing us that our decision to invest aggressively rather than contract during this recession has been the right one. AvePoint has a proven track record for not just achieving, but sustaining, successful growth. We were named for the third time to the Deloitte Technology Fast 500 list of fastest growing North American companies, with 1,095 percent revenue growth over the past five years. We have also been named to the Inc. 500 list of fastest growing private North American companies for three years in a row – 2012, 2011, and 2010.
That, to me, is the most important message in today’s economic landscape. AvePoint isn’t a lifestyle company satisfied with one year of success – rather, we continue to forge ahead in our pursuit of building a tremendous, enterprise-ready organization that not only offers the highest quality products and services to our current customer base, but also seeks to have as many organizations benefit as possible in order to help them achieve their full potential. The Inc. Hire Power Award is another fine accomplishment, and it inspires us more than ever to continue to continue meeting the needs of our customers and partners.
