Solver, Inc: Enabling World-Class Decisions

Many organizations today are faced with various business challenges. From increasing sales to enhancing productivity, these challenges inadvertently affect an organization’s overall performance and bottom line.

Without the presence of clearly defined goals and metrics, it would be quite a difficult task to dissect the vast amount of data available in order to determine if a company’s performance targets were achieved. Many organizations take the spreadsheet route, which might seem like a sound solution, but can lead to data integrity issues and information overload. However, more and more organizations are taking a consolidated approach to managing their performance with the implementation of a Corporate Performance Management (CPM) solution.

CPM is a holistic approach that involves integrating a company’s goals, key indicators, and metrics in order to improve an organization’s performance.

Understanding the core requirement of CPM in a business, Solver was established in 1996 which provides BI360, the leading Corporate Performance Management (CPM) software suite for companies of all sizes. Solver specializes in providing world-class financial reporting, budgeting and analysis with push-button access to all data sources that drive company-wide profitability. BI360 is available for cloud and on-premise deployment, focusing on four key analytics areas.

The firm is also the changing face of Corporate Performance Management (CPM) that delivers complete insight into every facet of the enterprise. It has been helping clients and partners increase productivity and efficiencies in their business. The company is founded on the vision to enable world-class decisions. With this vision, it has been building strategies and initiatives and has achieved 8 years of consecutive growth towards this goal.

In conversation with Nils Rasmussen, Founder and CEO

What made you select this vertical? And how successful was your first project roll on?

Solver started in 1996 as Consulting and Software Company focused on financial reporting, consolidation, and budgeting. The company quickly aligned with Microsoft and its popular SQL Server platform. From the beginning, Solver got used to working with a partner channel composed of ERP resellers, and by 2009, Solver launched a completely new product offering called BI360.

With our products, we have a three-step process to reduce risk for early adopters and to maximize feedback to our development team. We first have a beta program, then an invitation-only rollout to pre-qualified companies that will have the highest ROI and benefits from the current release and functionality. Our final step is to make the solution generally available to the marketplace. Therefore, our first product rollouts were successful because of our process.

‘It is difficult to start a venture. But far more difficult to maintain it.’ How do you interpret this saying?

In our 20+ years as a company and our three generations of product development, Solver has survived two recessions and a major market vendor/competitor consolidation. The major challenge we faced was when we were unable to spend enough time with each partner to understand their individual strategies and then align our partner activities with that. This is important to give the customers the best possible experience in each target market. But, Solver has emerged successfully from these challenges. One of the reasons that Solver has survived through different market cycles is that the product category is a must-have for the marketplace to manage their planning, reporting, and analysis to make superior decisions, and that has been confirmed by Solver’s heavy internal use of BI360.

Could you list Solver’s success factors?

People – our company culture is comprised of uniquely talented individuals that are given the space to develop and innovate for the advancement of our customers and partners.

Product – BI360 is the third product that Solver has developed in twenty years, and it inherited the best ideas from its two predecessors and a thorough and forward-looking view of what customers want and need today and in the future.

Partners – Building a good partner channel is more complex than most software vendors think. Our channel is built from over twenty years of relationships with a unique philosophy of developing a win-win partnership.

How well do your employees know their role in contributing to the company’s success and how do you bring the best out of an employee?

Solver has been growing up from a very small company to more than 100 team members worldwide this year. Increasingly, we are striving to communicate strategies and goals at the various levels and by departments. At Solver, the goal is to minimize top-down supervision and maximize independent thinking and decision-making, granted there is an understanding of strategy and goals. We have initiatives like group meetings and corporate meetings where we stress this desired behavior.

Are there any new products to be launched into the market? Where do you see the company a couple of years from now?

We just had the most important product release in our organization’s history when we launched the BI360 Cloud. We are increasingly building our strategies and initiatives around our vision statement and one of the metrics to measure our success in doing this is to see if Solver has become the global leader in mid-market Corporate Performance Management by 2023. We still want to introduce BI360 to new partners and countries, and with that expansion will come more innovations and growth in our global organization. Our goal is to be the global leader in midmarket CPM for both on-premise and cloud platforms. 

About the CEO

Nils Rasmussen is the Founder and CEO of Solver. He is responsible for the development of both overall company strategy as well as software & services delivery. Since its foundation, he has led the Solver team to complete close to 1,000 implementations worldwide. Prior to this, Rasmussen worked in international sales and consulting roles in various countries. He is a frequent speaker at industry conferences and an author of numerous BI books.

“We deliver new technology that drives Business Intelligence and Performance Management.”