Mar 10, 2022

The revenue operating systems market continues to rapidly expand as firms continue to invest in technologies that support and enhance selling and customer interactions across sales, marketing and customer success initiatives using digital channels, data analytics and artificial intelligence. According to Verified Market Research, the global sales enablement market will rise from $1.7 billion in 2020 to $7.3 Billion by 2028. OLEG.MARCH Bigtincan is one such revenue operating system software platform that is not only experiencing strong growth but helped to pioneer the category. Founded in 2011 in a small office above a coffee shop in Sydney, Australia, by CEO David Keane and CFO Geoff Cohen (since deceased), Bigtincan’s mission is helping brands automate sales content management, training, coaching, document creation and buyer interaction into a single digital experience. The innovative company’s go-to-market headquarters is now in Boston, Massachusetts, but listed on the Australian stock exchange (ASX:BTH). On the company’s founding idea, Keane states, “We took a cloud-first view, and whilst we did a lot of work on mobile and do today still, it was really about the mobile view of informational architecture. Let's deliver that together and let's bring that to people who need it most. And what we discovered was the people that needed it right now were people that were working with customers. We call them salespeople a lot, we use that term sales enablement, but it's really anybody that's working with a customer.” Keane set out to make technology for people interacting with customers less intimidating. Most people in these positions were not technologists. They didn’t necessarily think in as much a structured way as someone in a backend part of the company or an engineering group or a legal group or a finance group. “So if we approach it with automatically delivering them the information that they need in a way that feels natural for them to use, they'll simply engage more with it. And that was really the vision behind the company, and that was how we started in Australia,” says Keane. MORE FOR YOU They discovered a few early customers who saw this as a way of solving their real world problems. One of them was the Australian division of Merck, the global pharmaceutical company. “They said to us, ‘Oh yeah, this is a real problem. Our people are out there visiting doctors and medical professionals, but they're not organized. They haven't got access to the right material. The systems we give them, they're laptop based and had to have VPNs and all of this was confusing.’ And the Bigtincan technology solved the problem,” says Keane. The Australian division of Merck took a chance on a small start-up and deployed Bigtincan’s technology to great success. Then the technology was introduced to Merck in North America. It was a defining moment for Keane and his team. So much so, that in 2013 the company moved its go-to-market headquarters to the US in Boston Massachusetts to follow the business. Keane also moved his family to Boston. With their increasing customers, the company raised early venture capital from an Australian VC who got behind the company early on, enabling the company to make the move to the US. “But then we realized, how are we going to continue fund the company to make the investments that our customers need to build the technology? Normally the journey is, well, you move the company domicile to North America, and you find a US VC and they come and invest in the company, and then that's the journey you go on. We made this decision, which was to take advantage of the Australian public markets. So, we did an IPO in 2017,” says Keane. Today, the company has posted strong results. According to its latest financial filing, Bigtincan is on track to achieve or exceed $119m in ARR and $109m revenue for FY22. Annualised Recurring Revenue increased by 132% with 86% gross margins. Having access to the public markets helped fuel the company’s aggressive acquisition strategy, having acquired 11 companies, including ClearSlide, VoiceVibes, Vidinoti and most recently Brainshark in August 2021. “We increased our market value from $40 million to over $500 million and we’re on the path to do even more. So, even though we're a global company and we have 90% of our revenue in North America, and most of our people are in North America, we still have a connection to Australia in our heart because we have a bunch of core developers here, but we also have our public company status on the Australian Stock Exchange,” says Keane. Keane grew up in Canberra, Australia, and later moved to Sydney. He earned his undergraduate degree in economics from the Australian National University and his master’s in economics from Macquarie Graduate School of Management. He started working for Novell out of college. “I was so fortunate to get there at that time. That was when Novell was fighting Microsoft over the domination of the local area network. And it was a really interesting battle. I learned so much from that about why the infrastructure of technology is so important and why networking is fundamentally the tool set that lets us think more broadly about what computers can do. Learned a lot from Novell,” says Keane. In 2000 he became COO of KGRIND, a VC-funded provider of broadband content for the Web, but that company did not survive the Dotcom bust in 2001. He later was the founder and CTO of voice of IP company Veritel Wireless. “That company was sold into another Australian public listed company, which is where my connection to the public markets started. I saw the opportunity that you can get in the public markets and why it can be a really nice foundation. It was really helpful,” says Keene. Of his journey to becoming an entrepreneur, Keane says, “I think there are probably two different kinds of people. There are some people who always know that's what they're going to do. And there are other people where it almost just happens. I think I'm probably in the latter camp. I started off really enjoying working in technology. Loved it. Thought it was so interesting and found that it was something I liked to do." As for the future? “I think technology like ours has an opportunity to help customer-facing people to make better decisions and to help their customers create what we call the ‘buying experience of the future.’ In a world where information is ubiquitous, everyone can search anything, everyone can go anywhere. What's left is the experience. So if this technology can help deliver a better buying experience, that's what will make a lasting difference,” concludes Keene.