Craft beers, nerf guns, and community service aren’t the only things that have helped us become the fastest growing company in the multi-billion dollar industry of IT service management. Lots of hard work and happy customers have led to expanded business and a growing workforce at Samanage.

Our founder and Ceo Doron Gordon has made it a critical point to ensure that we maintain our unique culture,  even as the excitement grows around our partnership with Salesforce.

Part of our culture is, of course, Friday Fun. And, what could be more fun than sitting down with our chief, nerf gun in hand, and learning more about his vision?!

Samanage has doubled its workforce in about a year. What does that say about the company?

DG: We have more people!  But kidding aside, what’s led to the growth is the growth of the business. We have been bringing in new customers, larger customers and basically doubling the size of our business. That requires scaling up the sales and customer organization, as well as scaling up the engineering organization to ensure that we are making the necessary investments in our current and future product.

Samanage has been named one of the best places to work by the Triangle Business Journal for four consecutive years. Why do you think that is?

DG: It’s because of the people that work here and chose Samanage as their home. At the end of the day, people create the culture. It’s not the other way around. We do feel that we have created an environment where people can do their best work, and we have exceptional minds working here.

How do you maintain your culture as the company continues to grow?

DG: You have to invest in it proactively. We’ve put the resources into our leadership team and our People organization to ensure that we’re monitoring the culture we have. We’re also at a stage where we have two different cultures merging together: the core Samanage team and the new team members we’ve brought in to run the enterprise side of the business. So, that collision or merging of two different cultures is something we are monitoring closely, so that it goes in our desired direction.

Speaking of the enterprise side, the Samanage “enterprise” product is built on the Salesforce platform. How did that partnership come about?

DG: Salesforce invests in category leaders, so the fact that Salesforce wanted to partner with Samanage is a vote of confidence on our position in the market and in the industry. That’s how the relationship got started.

Why do you think the Salesforce platform was the right fit for the new Samanage application?

DG:  The reason we wanted to build the application on Salesforce is that Samanage was always on a path to become a large, enterprise software company that focuses on the entire customer segment: from small business, to mid-market, to enterprise.  The game plan was to build the core product into something to serve the needs of large customers. Salesforce gives us an opportunity to accelerate that plan. We can quickly get to customers with a great partner, so it was an easy decision.

The company was built around the success of the core Samanage Service Desk product. How do you continue to improve that part of the company?

DG: We’ll continue to put the necessary focus on putting the right people on the right teams for that product. We love all our kids equally, but the mid-market product is substantially larger right now. Even with all of the excitement around the Salesforce partnership and the enterprise product, we know that we need our mid-market product to continue to receive the right amount of attention.

All companies strive for effective customer service. Why do you think Samanage scores so highly on customer reviews?

DG: When we started the company, our set of values were built around customer success and customer happiness. I think that needs to be the attitude of any company. We have a saying about the way we operate: “Get it done. Do it right.”  Our software is built around the customer experience, so we knew that was our main value at the beginning. Then we made sure that any individual that we bring into the organization is focused on making our customer successful.  That’s easier said than done, and we had to continuously tweak the process through which we engage with our customers, but the outcome is what you see now. We’re the highest rated in the industry. If you ask a customer about why they chose Samanage, they’ll tell you about the customer experience, from the on-boarding team, to the customer success team, support, even the sales development team’s first touch, everybody in the chain is focused on out-servicing the competition.

It has been about ten years since you started the company. How does Samanage compare to your vision from ten years ago?

DG: Bigger and better.

What goals do you still have for Samanage?

DG: Get bigger and get better (laughs).

If you would like to be a part of the “bigger and better” that Doron mentioned, check out the Samanage careers page. If you’re interested in a customer-friendly ITSM solution, sign up for a free trial at www.samanage.com.