What It Takes: Mark Shirman | Founder, president and CEO of GlassHouse Technologies, Framingham
Photo/Matthew L. Brown
Mark Shirman, founder, president and CEO of GlassHouse Technologies, turned to high tech as an alternative to a career as a rock musician.
Mark Shirman isn't your typical CEO. One look around the Framingham offices of the company he founded, GlassHouse Technologies, and that is apparent. The office is decorated with rock music posters and memorabilia, and The Beatles and Bob Marley are featured prominently. His 9-year-old company is an IT services and consulting firm that focuses on helping large companies store their data in the most efficient and effective way possible. Here, the Sutton resident and Brandeis graduate tells MetroWest495 Biz about the company and how he started it.
How did you get the idea to start the company?
My background is growing IT services companies, primarily on the applications side of the house. I spent some time looking at the (data) infrastructure market. Even though I lived in Hopkinton at the time and was surrounded by EMC folks at barbecues and little league games, I didn't know what they did. I got very intrigued about where the services companies might be in storage and infrastructure, and there was nobody out there. Everybody who was out there providing advice to customers was either selling equipment or were resellers of other companies' equipment. So, if you wanted strategic advice on what to buy, they would come in and give you a strategy, which would be to buy more equipment. Storage utilization was in the single digits, and it just didn't make any sense.
So, what does GlassHouse do?
We're a data center services company focused in four key areas: Backup and storage, virtualized environments, data center moves and consolidation and data security.
How do your clients come to the conclusion that they need your services?
There are not many companies out there with specialization in infrastructure. Many of those that do (specialize in infrastructure) sell equipment as their primary focus. So, any advice and guidance we give our customers is completely independent.
When you started the company, how did you deal with the funding maze and things like real estate and hiring?
We raised a small amount of seed money to begin with. And from there, we assembled a team. My co-founder Richard Scannell and I assembled a team of experts, if you will. We worked in a really small niche; we didn't have to make a lot of commitments. We're not a manufacturing company, and we're not an R&D company, so we didn't have to hire lots of people. We could sell a little bit, deliver a little bit and sort of do it stepwise so that we could raise money in conjunction with customer success. At the end of our first year, we had about 30 customers. Some of them even paid us. We parlayed that into the ability to raise more money. We got more customers, we raised a little more money; we looked for acquisitions, and that's how we grew, sort of organically and through acquisition.
Is that how you intended to do things from the beginning?
Pretty much. If you take a look at our initial presentation to VCs, it's not very different from the way the company looks now. The technologies are a little different, as are some of the focus areas. But the basic business model hasn't changed.
Are VCs sensitive to that kind of thing?
VCs will either invest in a great widget, they'll invest in a management team, which is what I think they did here, or they'll invest in a market. We're not widget guys. We're a good quality management team with experience applying a different business model to the right market at the right time.
What was the company's biggest challenge in the beginning, and what's its biggest challenge going forward?
Our biggest challenge at the beginning was that we were really using a revolutionary market approach. People did not buy infrastructure services from independent advisors. They just bought it from the guys they bought their equipment from, and they did it themselves. If we lose deals, it's because (potential customers) want to continue to do it themselves, so our biggest challenge is educating the market that it would add value to their process and it would help them save money and increase service levels. Now, it's just about execution.
WBJ Web Partners
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