Non-Profit Tech Blog

Gary Allison is the new VP of Engineering over at Convio. He was nice enough to sit in with me and do a telephone interview (no .mp3 this first time). As usual in these first interviews, a communications or marketing person accompanies the interviewee as well. In this case, another newbie to Convio, Tad Druart, Director of Corporate Communications was there on the line.

Unlike Scott Crowder’s issues with Kintera, Convio is in what the Convio people call the “leadership position” (i.e. with 1400 clients, they’re the big dog). This means Gary’s biggest challenge isn’t in securing confidence and enacting radical strategy but in working with what Convio has got. His main task right now is to assist with the GetActive – Convio software integration. GetActive is now known as the Berkeley team in Convio parlance and he’s active in trying build close bonds between the Berkeley team and the rest of Convio.

Although strangely enough, I don’t feel that Convio is sitting on its laurels any more. They’ve got a lot of future competition ahead with the Salesforce.com’s and Microsoft’s of the world still lurking about in the CRM space.

Mr. Allison’s main expertise is in software development and leading complex teams and working on pretty complex product sets. He doesn’t consider himself a hardcore IT guy. He really likes the Convio product management team and thinks they’re extremely strong. Also, he feels that Convio is looking for the timely delivery of products. He’s pretty enthusiastic about Convio’s product advisory council and the customer advisory group. He’s also had a chance to see how the training sessions go with Convio clients. Apparently, a Convio custom is to have their executive staff meet with their customer’s trainees after training, usually over finger food and cocktails. Any of you readers who use Convio, can you confirm this for me?

Mr. Allison has done some tech work for the Third World. Apparently, when he was working over at Simdesk, he helped provide on-demand services to over 300,000 Brazilian school kids. He also did similar things with charter schools in Chicago and a school in Houston. He found these causes appealing to him.

All in all, he really likes the management team and thinks they’re fantastic (hope he’s not bucking for a raise this early, I keed I keed). And I quote him on this: “if you want to be a winner, you’ve got to play with winners.” Frankly, in my own professional life, that has always been true.

Mr. Allison considers Convio to be a very similar high-demand solution like Simdesk. Convio is a 24 by 7 system and it simply can’t fail. One of his longer-term goals though is to integrate the IT group into the product planning process. He wants IT to have more visibility and input when new products are being created and planned.

Mr. Allison thinks Convio has a tremendous amount of industry knowledge in the product and that it shows. I have to interject here and say that both Convio and Kintera have done a tremendous amount of work in learning the fundraising processes that power nonprofits. Mr. Allison then pointed out that his biggest job right now was to marry the best of Convio and GetActive and produce an even stronger product.

So I asked Mr. Allison the questions you’ve all been waiting for. Is Convio ever going to give us a product roadmap? Currently, the roadmap is ONLY open to customers. However, I pointed out to both Gary Allison and Tad Druart that part of the internal sales problems I had in pushing these CRM was that I didn’t have a roadmap. I couldn’t easily show my fellow executive staff members whether or not any existing issues they had with the CRM in question would be dealt with in future releases. It’s an odd marketing strategy and one that frankly, should go the way of the dodo. However, they admitted their “leadership position” gave them more leverage to start posting publicly their future positions on a new technology or strategy direction.

At the very least, Convio demos will be available on the Web. This is going to be a huge point in their favor if they really do this. It’s quite difficult to get busy Executive Directors or Operations Directors to get in front of a sales pitch. The timing issues alone could delay for months an internal presentation on CRM technology. It’s simply best for a Convio demo to be available so that evaluations can occur at the convenience of the staff.

And on to the long-awaited issue of integration… Right now, integration for Convio means integration with the existing GetActive codebase and employees. However, Mr. Allison’s background in software development couldn’t stop the two of us of engaging in ubergeek talk about the relative merits of JSON vs. XML. So yes, they are looking at JSON, XML and even REST. And yes, they do want to get more open. And yes, they are looking at better Javascript integration. And yes, Gary Allison’s background in on demand services and software development was and is a key to understanding Convio’s strategic direction. And yes, openness is the word of the day even at Convio. However, no promises have been made but we never heard word of these technologies out of any Convio employee ever before. And that has to be a good sign.