Posted by admin on December 10, 2011 RSS

Today, Pingar Inc is announcing the recruitment of Owen Allen as VP Solutions, North America. For me, this marks a key milestone in Pingar’s entry into the North America market.

I moved to Santa Clara, CA in early June with my wife Jacqui to establish Pingar Inc.

My first task was to present Pingar to an invited audience of local entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and angels at Launch: Silicon Valley 2011. This was my first introduction to the local Valley eco-system. It was the first such presentation by any New Zealand company.  It was an interesting experience, but from those first days, the scale of opportunity was obvious.

We needed a base from which to work and selected the Plug & Play Tech Center in Sunnyvale. This is home to 140 technology start-ups and epitomises the Valley’s approach to entrepreneurship. It provides not only a ‘cube’ to work from but also a host of networking opportunities where you can meet and reach out to different start-ups, corporate sponsors and the ever present VC & Angel community. It’s a very different culture to that experienced by start-ups here in New Zealand.

Our first major hire breakthrough came with the recruitment of Megan Tobin as VP, Marketing & Americas. This was the result of some good old-fashioned Kiwi networking. Having spent two years as a consultant with Microsoft NZ and then five years at Orion Health, most recently as VP Global Marketing, Megan brought a great understanding of the US market to the table. Very quickly, I learnt to spell things with ‘z’ rather than ‘s’, understand that a VP was more pervasive than a Director and that Thanksgiving was an excuse to shop, not an actual holiday. These things are important if you are not to be regarded as completely incompetent in the US of A.

Other highlights of the first few weeks included my meeting with Robert Scoble in Half Moon Bay and THAT Interview. I had an interesting off camera chat with Robert. It confirmed my suspicion. Tech media in the Valley is very focused on social media and mobile. Enterprise start-ups occupy a less glamorous space. Maybe Big Data will change that.

I learnt that Silicon Valley really is an eco-system in its own right. While much of the rest of the country was preparing for economic collapse, bubbles of every variety were popping up all over the South Bay: Social media bubbles; mobile bubbles; sparkling bubbles. I did not know until I began to explore the Valley just what a great wine growing region this is. The Santa Cruz Mountain Wine Trail is a must for any lover of fine wine.

In October, having spent four weeks offshore visiting other Pingar subsidiaries, I returned to the US as Pingar was a sponsor of the Microsoft SharePoint Conference in Anaheim. This was one of those defining four day events. It was a gotcha moment. Megan & Alyona, Pingar’s Chief Research Officer, gave some great exhibition booth demonstrations to some of the 7,500 delegates.  Metadata and taxonomies had just got sexy. Pingar had arrived.

Today we are announcing the recruitment of Owen Allen as Pingar Inc VP Solutions, North America. Together with Megan, the plan is to build the team in North America and execute our Go to Market strategy through 2012.

I will be returning to Silicon Valley in February when Pingar is sponsoring two further target events: SPTechCon 2012 in San Francisco and Strata Making Data Work Conference 2012 in Santa Clara. At SPTechCon 2012, the North America team will demonstrate some of our latest SharePoint-focused solutions whilst at Strata 2012, our New Zealand-based research team will fly in to talk about the company’s on-going R&D roadmap and how Pingar will continue to help enterprise meet the challenge of unstructured data.

In the meantime, Pingar Inc continues to be based in the Plug & Play Tech Center in Sunnyvale and we are currently looking at recruiting more pre-sales technical engineers in key cities across North America. You can check out our Careers page for more details.

For myself, Jacqui & I look forward to an extended return visit to Silicon Valley in the spring and summer of 2012. I met a number of great people in the (too) few months I spent in the region and I look forward to working with them again.

In the meantime, you can of course contact Megan & Owen directly.

Megan Tobin, VP Marketing: megan.tobin@pingar.com
Owen Allen, VP Solutions: owen.allen@pingar.com

 

Peter Wren-Hilton
Pingar Holdings Limited CEO
Typing this up on a wonderful day in the Lifestyle City that is Tauranga, New Zealand

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