The Hidden Power Behind SolarWinds’ IT Success - Sudhakar Ramakrishna, President & CEO, SolarWinds

First of all, thank you Robert for having me on this show. I'm really excited to have this conversation. The name has a very interesting history. Back in 1999, when the two brothers that founded SolarWinds were dreaming up a name for the company, the goal they had was that this company needed to be the hottest company in the world or in the universe. So they thought about where else they could derive inspiration than from the sun for coming up with the hottest company in the world. And as you know, the hottest places, or one of the hottest places in the world, are the winds around the sun. That's how they came up with the name SolarWinds. But as you said, we don't have anything to do with solar panels. Instead, we build some of the best and most compact selling software for enterprises to simplify their environments. When I say simplify their environments, corporate environments are becoming more and more complex every day with new applications, new systems, new networks, new clouds, new regions and locations. At the same time, they worry about security concerns, capacity, talent, and cost. That's where we come in. We demystify complexity, reduce costs, and improve their productivity through extremely simple, powerful, and secure solutions. That is the business of SolarWinds, and we call it broadly speaking, enabling operational resilience for customers.

In terms of monitoring feedback, we use multiple channels to learn from customers. One of the richest forms of learning from customers is a community that we built over the years called Thwack. Thwack has more than 200,000 practitioners who are using our software and everyone else's software. Through that forum, we are constantly learning what's on their minds, what's working, what's not, what are their goals, etc. We also have the ability to test out our ideas. What better way to learn about an idea or feedback on the idea than the community itself? In addition to that, there's a term I use called field intelligence. Field intelligence represents our very large base of partners. We have operations in 26 different countries. Staying close to the customer, being on the ground helps us learn a lot about what's happening, and we try to structure that feedback and bring it back into our plans. A third one, which I personally enjoy doing a lot, is we have to show personal commitment to customers by engaging with them, talking to them, understanding what's working and what's not. And of course, increasingly we're learning about feedback from customers within the product itself. Customers are able to provide us feedback as they are using the product, and that's an instant way of learning what's working, what's not, and how things can be improved. And then there are a bunch of other ways through social media and industry forums that we gather feedback as well.