BitTitan: A Saas software company

When we at Bangalore Insider hear the word ‘cloud’, we immediately tend to imagine giants like AWS, Google and Microsoft (Reliance and Microsoft have a deal in place by the way, to onboard India’s small and medium businesses to the cloud, interesting to see how that would pan out). However, that need not be the case always, especially since market size is not a factor to worry about. Every organization with a digital component could technically host its infrastructure on the cloud, and in this sense, the size of the market would literally reach the real cloud and beyond towards outer space, in a strict metaphorical sense.

More often than not, we tend to overlook the layers that consist of the overall market ecosystem. For instance, we rave about product designers like Apple, overlooking their manufacturers like Foxconn and Pegatron. We rave about e-commerce giants like Amazon and Walmart, overlooking the thousands of businesses building the actual products that customers love. We rave about games, forgetting the developer ecosystem that slogged for years to build it in the first place. In short, we look at the surface without bothering to study the depth of ecosystems that run the world’s systems and processes. 

Today, at Bangalore Insider we spoke to Brad Rosairo, the director of Business Development for Asia-Pacific, for BitTitan, a company that helps IT professionals manage and deploy cloud technologies through automation. Below are the excerpts from our interaction.  

Kindly provide us with some brief info about your company.

BitTitan empowers IT, service professionals, to successfully deploy and manage cloud technologies through automation with our product, MigrationWiz. This is our 100% SaaS solution for mailbox, document, public-folder and Microsoft Teams migrations. Since 2009, BitTitan has moved more than 19 million users to the cloud for 43,000 customers in 187 countries. We support leading cloud ecosystems including Microsoft, Google and Dropbox. We are a global company with offices in Seattle and Singapore. As part of our Asia Pacific operations, we have an in-region team focused on meeting customer needs in India. 

What made you start/join this company and what problems do you think it solves?

My inspiration for joining BitTitan was a combination of the company culture, my desire to be in the cloud industry and knowing people in the business who I had worked with and knew I could trust. One big reason for coming to BitTitan was my relationship with Tony Rummans, who is our vice president of global sales and someone I previously worked with.

What drew my interest was hearing about BitTitan’s company culture from Tony and my dinner with BitTitan founder and CEO Geeman Yip in Singapore. BitTitan really has an entrepreneurial spirit and hearing Geeman’s passion, drive and enthusiasm about the business was inspiring. Our company emphasizes working hard but also having fun and pursuing continued growth. Being in the tech space is an area I’ve always wanted to work in, and when I researched the developments happening in the cloud space, I knew joining BitTitan was an opportunity I couldn’t pass up. I like being in industries that allow me to continue learning and developing my skill set, so I knew this was a good move for me. 

Before I joined BitTitan, I was reading about the cloud and how Australia, India and other countries in the APAC region are so far behind the rest of the world regarding cloud adoption. I’m based in Australia and remember thinking, “How can this be?” It was a bit of a shock. When I joined BitTitan, I learned that there’s so much more to cloud adoption that we need to know in Australia and the APAC region. I did over 100 site visits in my first year with BitTitan, and I kept hearing, “We want to move to the cloud, but we’re not ready yet.” Fast forward to where we are now regarding COVID-19, and we need to move companies quickly and successfully to the cloud to enable remote work, business continuity, security protections and the ability to scale and improve efficiencies, especially with cost management. The cloud enables all these things, and BitTitan is able to provide the ability to easily move to the cloud. As a 100% SaaS-based company, we’re able to swiftly and securely execute remote migrations in a cost-effective manner. 

Tell us about yourself, your previous jobs/ventures. What were you doing before working with BitTitan?

Previously, I worked as a vice president for Neota Logic, an AI company based out of New York and provided a compliance platform, or an AI tool, that helped with decision-making in the legal space. Many corporations around the world would leverage the platform, which would provide end users with legal expertise without having to speak to a lawyer. It was like getting legal advice from an app; it was pretty amazing. When it comes to technology, the legal space is very much manually oriented. We helped a lot of companies move from a manual-driven process to an automated process. 

Prior to that I worked as the managing director for ProQuest, an education technology company in the higher education space. We provided cloud-based information services and technology to the world’s academic researchers, libraries, students and scientists. We sold to universities throughout the world and I grew the business to become over a $100 million business within the APAC region. I also spent six years as the global country manager working at Dun & Bradstreet within the risk management solutions team, where I advised the top 500 ASX listed companies about financial and credit risk, data, rules-based scoring and ERP data migrations.

Where is your company based? Why do you think your current base of operations is the best place for you?

BitTitan is a global company, with offices in Seattle and Singapore. Our Singapore office serves as our APAC hub and provides in-region support for India and other countries throughout the Asia Pacific region. The great thing about having an office within the region is we’re able to offer support locally, whether it’s for sales, marketing, or product development and support. 

As director of business development, what are you paranoid about? What keeps you awake at night?

In my role as director of business development, my objective is to identify how to build a market or an emerging market. We have to drive brand awareness, provide support, engage in marketing, ensure a successful customer experience, and make sure that all these areas are operating efficiently. Ultimately, I want to determine an effective way to build our business to where it is needed.

If anything keeps me up at night, it is asking myself how I can help companies increase efficiency. How can I impact others and help our team and our clients? We love to see people move to the cloud because it enables cost savings and increased efficiency. If your company can save money and be more efficient while running your business largely the same way, why wouldn’t you do that? I want to help our customers be more efficient in their day-to-day business, and right now, it’s the perfect time to leverage the cloud to do this.

As a business leader and in business development, you need to be able to adapt and be agile. You need to look at things differently instead of continually relying on the norm. I think in our current situation with COVID-19, everyone has to re-evaluate what their business can do to be more efficient. As a company, we’re trying to determine what sort of impact we can provide and what value we can add to help our customers reduce costs and increase efficiencies. The good news is that the cloud enables these benefits, and our tools can get companies to the cloud faster to realize these benefits. 

Kindly mention the names of your key competitors. How are you better or different than them?

A couple of our competitors would be Cloudiway, which specializes in data migration solutions, and Binary Tree, which offers cloud migration products. What differentiates BitTitan from our competitors is that we provide a migration tool for our partners to leverage and don’t get involved in the professional services side of the business. That keeps us from directly competing with our partners. We’re a partner-centric organization, so instead of selling our products directly to the end user, we work with our partners to help them be successful with their clients. Some of our competitors focus on professional services and bundle their migration tool with that service. 

In addition, not only are we enabling partners to be successful so they can service their customers seamlessly, but our solutions are 100% SaaS-based. This allows our partners to leverage these solutions for remote migrations at anytime from anywhere to service their customers, no matter where they’re located. 

How hard is it to have a work-life balance as director of business development, and how do you manage it?

Is this pre-pandemic or post-pandemic? (Laughs.) I enjoy what I do, which is key. I love the team that we have. I love my direct team in APAC and the overall BitTitan team. Being in different time zones can make getting things done challenging, but we all help one another and collaborate really well, so that makes life much easier.

I think of this not as work-life balance, but as work-life integration. How do you integrate your personal life into your work life and vice versa? For example, I could get a call from my daughter asking for money in the middle of my workday. Or I could get a call during dinner from someone in India or Singapore. I’ll integrate these calls into my day, let whoever is calling know what I’m doing and that I will help them. I don’t mind doing this, but it’s important to communicate that even though I’m about to go into a meeting or this may be outside of work hours, I will still help you. 

I’ve been able to grow accustomed to work-life integration very well. It’s something I’ve been practicing for the last 15 years, and I still enjoy what I do. Being able to travel and meet customers is probably one of the best jobs in the world. You get to meet people and talk about what you do, experience culture, experience food and experience different parts of the world. It’s pretty cool. 

What’s the biggest misconception people have about you? Why do they have that? What’s the reality?

Generally, with sales or business development, there may be a perception that all you’re after is someone’s business, and it’s all about quotas and commissions. But there is so much more to our work than that, and ultimately, it’s about the customer. 

I believe if you have a good relationship with a sales individual at any company, you can get the best outcome for both parties. By making the process more personable and selling on value instead of quotas or commission, you’ll be looked after better. If you can provide the best service, it will ultimately be a win-win situation that both you and the customer feel good about. Even if they don’t buy from you in that instance, they may come back and buy from you later or refer you to someone else. 

What gets you excited about this company?

As I mentioned, I enjoy what I do, and being in the cloud space is exciting. As a company, I think we’re at the right place at the right time. The cloud industry is poised for significant growth, and companies need to be cloud-ready right now. 

As a tech company, BitTitan is primed for growth and positioned to serve as a critical component of cloud adoption as we help businesses move to the cloud. Markets that are behind will eventually need to catch up, which will translate to growth within the industry. That’s what I’m excited for — watching and seeing that growth about to happen, being a part of it, and saying, “Hey, I helped deliver that and grow our business.” I’m looking forward to the future and the results we will achieve. 

Tell us what a day in your life looks like? What’s your schedule from the time you get up until you hit the bed at night?

My schedule can be pretty crazy, which is partly due to my being based in Australia. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, I’ve found my meetings have gone from an hour or two hours in length to several 30-minute blocks. 

During the week, I will take calls at night from 11 p.m. to 2 a.m. So I won’t go to bed until 3 a.m. several nights of the week. This is because of the different time zones; I’ll field calls from the U.S. and the EMEA region. 

Generally, I wake up between 7-8 a.m. and my calls will begin at 8:30 a.m. I have between seven and eight calls a day with a few breaks in between, in which I’ll go for a walk with the dog or go outside and get some fresh air. Around 6 p.m. when our EMEA team comes online, I will take a call. Then I’ll have a break for dinner until my next call with one of our directors, which may be around 9:30 p.m.

My schedule is not quite 24/7, but it is round-the-clock. I try to take advantage of gaps where I can. I tell everyone I work with, “Don’t change your schedule for me because I’m based in Australia.” I’m happy to work with it, as I’ve been doing it for the past 15 years. 

Tell us about your team. How did you meet each other?

We have a small team that has done amazing work throughout the APAC region. Darren Lum is our APAC business development manager who originally was a potential partner for BitTitan. He came into our office to lead a whiteboard presentation and really impressed us. We knew we wanted him to join our team, and he’s with us now managing our partners in India, Australia and New Zealand.

Reiko Goto was from my professional network and ran my Japan business for 10 years. I spoke to her about BitTitan, and she loved everything about our company and culture. Having her join our APAC team was a huge win for me. 

Stella Goh is our senior solution specialist and does a fantastic job with our customers in India, Australia, New Zealand and the greater APAC market. She has a huge customer base in India and maintains strong business relationships with our partners. 

We have amazing people on our team, which is what we want, because when you’re happy and really good at what you do, that translates to your customers. Having a team of individuals who are authentic and good with people contributes to our company’s overall success and makes us fun to do business with. Ultimately, that is what we want. 

Know a great startup story or want to share your own? Write to us at bhumikka@insidermediacorp.com and we will get back to you. For more updates follow Bangalore Insider on Facebook and Instagram.

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