I recently interviewed Bill Carey about best practices in the software industry.
Bill Carey is the Vice President of Marketing and Business Development at Siber Systems. With over 16 years’ marketing and business development experience, Bill guides the overall market strategy and business direction for Siber Systems. He has developed strategic agreements with top tier companies such as Yahoo and Symantec as well as directed the successful launch of Siber Systems’ products to market. Prior to joining Siber Systems, Bill founded IAG Marketing, and co-founded and served as COO and CMO of Sandbox.com.
Bill, tell us about your company.
Siber Systems is a privately-held company, headquartered in Fairfax, Virginia, USA, with offices in Japan and Russia. We have 50 employees.
We released RoboForm, our first consumer product in 1999. Since then RoboForm has been translated into over 30 different languages and has millions of active users worldwide.
In 2004 Siber Systems developed RoboForm2Go, a portable version of RoboForm that allows users to take their passwords with them.
Our latest product is GoodSync, an easy and reliable file synchronization and backup solution we released in 2006. GoodSync enjoys numerous favorable reviews from both users and the press.
Our software has an outstanding reputation and has received thousands of media reviews, including reviews by the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Morningstar, Baron’s, Financial Times and more. Our software was named PC Magazine Editor’s Choice and CNET’s Best Software of the Year.
Tell us about the challenges facing software companies today?
Our biggest challenge is on the password manager side and keeping up with the ever-changing technologies. Because RoboForm works with several different browsers on several different operating systems, all of which are regularly updated, we’re constantly updating our software to keep up with those changes.
What is your firm doing to overcome these challenges?
We’ve been adding developers. Some of the developers are now specialized for these technologies. For example, we have a developer that focuses primarily on Android. This makes it easier to keep up with Android’s changes.
What do you consider to be best practices in the software industry?
Our goal is to make user’s lives easier and more secure. I think all companies should ensure they are focused on their goal and let that goal drive most business decisions. So for example if we are considering adding a feature to our software, we first as ourselves “Is that feature going to make user’s lives easier and more secure” and let the answer dictate whether or not we implement it.
