Executive Profile: Swayne Hill of Cloud9analytics
Swayne Hill of Cloud9analytics credits his experience managing a golf course in his teens with teaching him valuable lessons in business.
“In Western Canada, the golf season is four or five months. There’s a lot of intense pressure on available resources,” he said in a recent interview at his Redwood Shores offices.
“It sounds kind of trivial, but when you’ve got people so intent on getting a certain starting time that they’re sleeping in their cars in the parking lot and almost fighting each other to get queued up – it’s an intense atmosphere at 4:30 in the morning,” he said. “You learn to create a sense of calm and manage passions, and remain calm in the face of a lot of pressure.”
Those skills have served Hill well throughout his career, which three years ago led him to co-found Cloud9analytics, a software-as-a-service (SaaS) company.
Essentially, the firm sells companies performance management software that runs over the Internet – in the “cloud” – without the need for expensive computing equipment.
Not only does Hill believe that cloud computing – pioneered by the likes of Salesforce.com, Oracle and SAP – is the future, but with the current economy, he said, “The timing is just perfect.
“Here we’ve got an economy that’s beginning to expand again, and you’ve just come through a year and a half of painful contraction where spending has been slashed,” he said.
“You’re not going to invest in multimillion-dollar infrastructure projects if there are alternatives in the cloudspace where you can pick up services at a subscription fee.”
Here are some related posts:
Category: Executives, Startups, Strategy
