Tigerpaw CEO Talks ‘Matrix’ Data Mining Tool, Flagship Product Updates

To date, 2014 might be considered a “roaring” success for Tigerpaw Software. The Bellevue, Nebraska-based professional services automation (PSA) software provider entered December with revenues already up 10 percent over the largest year in its 31-year history, according to Tigerpaw CEO James Foxall.

Also, the company recently began searching for a vice president of sales and released details about next year’s Tigerpaw Partner Conference (which will take place in Omaha, Nebraska from Oct. 28 to Oct. 30).

So where is Tigerpaw headed in 2015? Foxall recently sat down with MSPmentor to provide updates about his company and its plans for next year.

MSPmentor: Tigerpaw hosted its fourth user conference earlier this year. What has your company been doing since that time?

James Foxall: Things have been great since the conference. Going into December, we were already past our top-line revenue over the previous year. Year-over-year, we’ve increased our revenues 20 percent. We’re onboarding new and larger clients at an increased pace as well.

MSPm: What products are you working on right now?

JF: We have an update to our flagship product that will come out in January. Now, users will have the ability to add a single contact across multiple accounts, which is really great when you’re dealing with multi-site locations or consultants that touch multiple customers. You’ve also got the ability to work with multi-site parent-child locations and do central billing, so you can invoice one parent for all the work done across all the children. These are a few of the things that our clients with 20 employees and up have been asking for.

We’ve also got a brand new piece of technology called “The Matrix” coming out. This will be, by far, the most powerful data mining and filtering tool you will find in any PSA. It’s just amazing!

MSPm: Can you tell me more about Matrix?

JF: We’ve got list views in our product now, and in the new Matrix, you have the ability to basically use a real-time reporting engine to pick the columns you want to see across multiple tables. You can custom build the fields you want to see, the order you want to see them in and custom filter criteria too. We’ve also built in child grids that allow you to see the details for an invoice or the contracts for an account, for example. When looking at your data, you can click and expand to actually see child data related to the parent data without ever leaving the Matrix. It has built in ability to do grouping, totaling and summations as well, so users can get averages, counts, totals and more based on groups defined by multiple columns. We also built in the ability to support all unlimited custom fields in Tigerpaw, so now you can bring in all of your custom fields and filter and search and sort on those. All the weird, esoteric data that you’re storing becomes part of your data mining tool.

Basically, you can build a list that gives you exactly what you want to see, filter the exact data that you’re looking for, group the data by any field or combination of fields and get the totals in a way that means something to you. This is an engine where you can save and share Matrices too. You can share them with groups, for example, so a sales manager can put together a callback list and send it to the sales team and choose who has the ability to edit it. You don’t have to recreate your own lists from scratch now that you can share them across an organization. Custom reporting tools typically create a static list. The Matrix is fully integrated in the product and creates dynamic lists, so it supports easily working with your filtered data. We think the Matrix is going to reduce a lot of need for custom reporting because people can just go in and get the data that they’re looking for.

MSPm: What’s the latest on Tigerpaw’s mobile CRM product?

JF: At the conference, you saw the early build. But since that time, we’ve revolutionized the UI and added some new functionality. It’s gone through the first level of live beta, so it’s getting a lot of refinement right now. Tigerpaw Mobile CRM will ship in January.

We’re getting in a lot of usability improvements based on beta feedback as well as finishing the stability and improving the performance. It’s built on the same platform as our mobile service module, so all of our new functionality is carried over into the service side too. Everyone on our mobile service platform will have access to the new service-related functionality and UI enhancements when we roll out mobile CRM next month.

MSPm: Any other features or products we should expect from Tigerpaw going forward?

JF: We’ve recently rolled out a new feature voting system in our community, which we’re very excited about. People can post new features, get suggestions and have an open dialogue about them. We expect that to help shape our future roadmap.

We have our new learning management system that’s going live at the end of January. It’s a system very much like online universities, in the sense that it is curriculum-based on the role of the individual employee using Tigerpaw, and it is really focused. It supports tests and prerequisites, and we’re even building a certification engine into it. We really think it’s going to revolutionize the training side of Tigerpaw.

All of the things you kind of saw early at the Tigerpaw partner conference, such as automated reports, are coming to fruition now.

MSPm: What else is on Tigerpaw’s roadmap for 2015?

JF: In the mobile product, by the end of Q1, you’re going to see payment swiping on the mobile service solution. Those doing break/fix work will be able to actually process a credit card against the invoice in the field and get paid before you walk out the door.

We are actively building our cloud solution too, and by next summer, you’re going to see us bring the robust UI of a desktop app to the cloud. Tigerpaw’s going to have an affordable, true cloud solution, and we’re very excited about that!

MSPm: Last question: What are your 2015 technology predictions and/or New Year’s resolutions?

JF: I think we’ll continue to see mobile become more and more important for the workforce, and I think we’ll also see more mergers in the IT space.

I don’t have any New Year’s resolutions. About three months ago, I moved to a low carb, high fat diet and dropped over 20 pounds, and I do high-intensity weight lifting six days a week, so I’m already covering the bases most people make resolutions on.

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