GeekWire on BoldIQ and new board member Paul Maritz
Paul Maritz, the former CEO of VMware and Pivotal Software, has joined the board of BoldIQ, a Bellevue, Wash.-based company that makes technology to quickly and efficiently schedule everything from trucks and planes to doctors and nurses.
Maritz, who made his mark as a high-ranking Microsoft executive, overseeing landmark versions of Windows, was an original investor in BoldIQ. The company’s technology traces its roots to DayJet, an on-demand business airline in which Maritz was an investor. DayJet folded in the 2008 crash, but the need for dynamic resource scheduling has only grown since then, Maritz said in an interview with GeekWire.
“This is a very interesting idea whose time has come,” Maritz said. “The on-demand economy demands this kind of a capability. Fortunately we’re in the right place to provide it.”
“Everything is now moving towards the on-demand model,” he explained. “On-demand cars, on-demand grocery shopping, on-demand repairs. Unlike Uber, in many cases in the on-demand world the underlying resource is not in infinite supply. To be efficient you have to schedule it efficiently and you have to schedule it to be where and when the customer wants it.”
Recalling a phrase from his Microsoft days, Maritz said, “I think BoldIQ can be the ‘Intel Inside’ of the on-demand economy.”
Maritz, who turned 60 last year, remains executive chairman at Pivotal but has taken himself out of day-to-day operational roles, freeing himself up to pursue a handful of for-profit and non-profit projects, devoting more time to investments that he has made over the past 10 years. On the non-profit side, for example, he’s the chairman of the board of the Mifos Initiative, an open source financial software platform.
BoldIQ is in the process of expanding its technology to a wider variety of industries and companies. Roei Ganzarski, the company’s CEO, described a test with a technical services company that was able to reduce, by 10 percent, the number of miles driven by its technicians, while also offering more reliable scheduling for customers.
The company will be offering those types of capabilities not only to large companies but also as a cloud-based service to smaller businesses that wouldn’t have the technology infrastructure or financial wherewithal to do dynamic scheduling on their own.
“Think of it as commoditization of optimization, if you will,” Ganzarski said.
The company’s most recent funding round was $3 million, raised in 2013. BoldIQ has 16 employees, but that reflects the fact that company outsources non-core functions such as marketing, public relations, finance and accounting, Ganzarski said. Maritz is the largest individual shareholder in the company, which is cash-flow positive.