I have been fortunate to be part of the software industry for more than 20 years. During these years, I have seen the evolution of solutions from mini computer-based applications to client/server applications and finally to multi-tenant cloud solutions. We have come far along this road. I have run multiple companies in both technological roles (head of development, CTO, Product Manager etc.) but also as CEO and Chairman of the Board. I have been working as leader for both software companies as well as system integrators. Besides these opportunities, I have been honored to be global Chairman and President for International Association of Microsoft Channel Partners (IAMCP) as well as President for the local Dallas-Fort Worth chapter.
The reason I am mentioning these roles is that it has been my desire for long to create a site where I can provide information to people about topics that I or any of my colleagues are very passionate about. Our company TELLUS International is known for its management consulting practice, but throughout the years we have sold and delivered enterprise solutions and the experience and skills that we have accumulated in given solution areas is something that I wanted to share via this site.
Our main company site TELLUS International has to do with management consulting, business models and tactical execution of business models. Our second and very important site is TELLUS Academy that is a full-blown learning management system (LMS) site that has been the source for hundreds of students to learn about topics that are relevant to them such as business modeling, channel building and management and many other topics to come. Besides these company sites, I have and maintain my personal blog (Dr. Salonen) where I blog about topics around software business but also personal life experiences that might be interesting to my readers.
I educate my clients to stay focused, so that is why I also wanted to keep these three sites separate with its own mission. I really like the trend of today’s web-sites, they are built to provide information and not just to “look good”. I would like to warn you that this site is not about how it looks and whether every sentence is correctly formulated and have the correct grammatical form. The objective of the site is really to inform, teach and coach you to be more effective what you do and some of the information we provide here might make you to contact us and potentially partner with us on exciting initiatives.
To put some context to upcoming content, I have defined a few areas that you can expect us to blog about. First and foremost, every organization whether you are an entrepreneur or enterprise, will have to put some time in setting the objectives of your solutions that you either acquire or build. I have been fortunate to be part of software selection projects for clients and I have personally built all of our solutions within TELLUS from ground up using latest technologies. Yes, I do tend to spend time myself on doing this as well. I believe that if an organization hires me to advice, I should really know something about it, shouldn’t I?
The section “Setting objectives of your solution” has to do with your aims and objectives that you have when getting into the cloud and app world that now very exciting and new to many organizations.
The section “Managing Your Business” has to do with topics around how to be an effective business leader using effective business solutions. This topics includes discussion of solution orchestration, integration of different solutions and how to implement and create a cohesive solution that feels like one solution and not as twenty different solutions that do not talk with each other. This topic includes also discussion about customer relationship management and life-cycle of your clients. Without paying clients, you do not have an enterprise, it is that simple.
The section “Marketing Your Business” is an intriguing topic that I have had the chance to work with the past few years. We were one of the first ones to do influencer intelligence back in 2007 and the approach we took was unheard of and we got some amazing results with some large organization doing the research. However, influencers are just one part of what a company has do know when doing marketing. There is a new generation of business leaders that are born to the Internet and the expectations from these users are completely different from the past. You can’t assume anymore that your solution is there forever because of your brand or product. Look what happen to some iconic vendors such as BlackBerry (formerly RIM), Kodak etc. They lost their shirt because they were not up-to-date what was happening on the consumer side.
The section “Customer Relationship Management” is near and dear to my heart. I have been building solutions in this domain as software vendor but also as end user. The list is very long and I remember the first one that I built was based on Paradox 3.0 and PAL programming language, which then became ObjectPal, and suddenly I was re-creating the same thing using Delphi and ObjectPascal. These solutions then moved to Lotus Notes and I have worked with solutions such as SugarCRM, SalesForce, Dynamics CRM etc. The current passion of mine is definitely Dynamics CRM 2013 Online and I will be posting information about my road with it within our TELLUS organization.
The section ” Document and Content Management” is an exciting topic and something that I have spent huge amount of time as well. I have worked with many different types of solutions ranging from Lotus Notes-based solutions to modern and state of the art solutions such as M-Files and Microsoft SharePoint. I claim to understand the topic pretty well as I have been running organizations building SharePoint-based solutions to large enterprises, but I have also accumulated lots of experience specifically in SharePoint 2013 and its new features and functionality. It is an exciting product and if you integrate it with Dynamics CRM 2013, it becomes a killer combination for people to use. But like with everything, things have to be built and nothing comes for free or automatically.
And finally, the section “Business Analytics” is something that I have lived with for more than 20 years. I have been head of development for more than 20 international software solutions within the business intelligence, data warehousing, analytics, executive information systems area and even my doctoral dissertation was about analytical application software solutions.
I hope that these pages will be of interest to you and please do provide feedback and ask questions if you have any in respect to my or my colleagues posts. We are learning every day and hopefully some of these learning’s will benefit you. Also, do subscribe to our newsletter which is the TELLUS newsletter. Our objective is to send out some interesting links and information to our readers on a monthly basis.
Yours,
Dr. Petri I. Salonen
Founder and CEO of TELLUS International, Inc.