In business discussions in the US, a lot of sports analogies are used. But it’s not the same scenario in Israel, where analogies are mostly conflicts- and war-based. The difference between the two is that if you lose a sports game, you may go home disappointed. In war, if you lose, you don’t go home. Different researchers have been toying with the idea that there are formative leadership experiences that deeply impact leaders and the way they practice their leadership. These types of conditions force you to be very good at what you do. Entrepreneurship and innovation are key traits in this environment. One must be competitive to survive.The Israel native, Shimon Alon, is the best example of one such persona for whom hardships have been the great life equalizer.
Story of the Rising Phoenix
Shimon Alon serves as the Chairman and Chief Executive Officer at Attunity, Inc., a data integration and Big Data management software company. Seven years ago, the company was on the verge of bankruptcy. It had $4 million in debt, no cash, and signs of a serious economic recession were just starting to emerge. But there were bright spots. Alon believed in the company, and after spending four years as an investor in Attunity, he joined as CEO in June 2008. Alon attributes a few key factors to the company’s improvement over seven years: Focusing on profitability, paying off debt, and growing by investing in talent, technology, and customer satisfaction. His leadership role at Attunity is constantly growing and evolving. His ultimate responsibility is to continue evangelizing company’s value for investors and shareholders.
Despite all the challenges, Alon knew that Attunity could be a leader in its space. His vision was to rebuild it by energizing and focusing the talented teams on going back to the company’s roots – making data universally available – and build and innovate from there. Today, Attunity partners with some of the largest and most successful technology companies in the world, and help successful customers become even better and stronger. Alon envisions Attunity as a $100M company in the next 2- 3 years and hopes to continue having many proud moments.
“I will also bring to fruition my vision to lead the data integration and Big Data management market with innovative solutions that focus on enabling customers to create real-time analytics for decision support and competitive advantage,” asserts Alon.
The A-Team at Attunity
The management team at Attunity had to make critical decisions in real time when they first started to rebuild the company a few years ago. The executives had to motivate the employees, customers, investors and partners to trust the new vision and support their plans. They also had to generate cash and drive revenue growth. A faithful leadership team helped Alon to overcome challenges, implement changes and lead the company to success and growth. Here inforced the foundation by developing the vision, communicating it, motivating everyone to join and providing the environment and resources to execute. Alon explains, “The bottom line is that turning around a company is an ongoing challenge and one that continues after each success. After all, the closer you come to your vision, the more you have to have another one following right after.”
Alon, along with his management team, ensures that they help their customers by providing speed, automation, scale, and performance. In 5 years, he expects Attunity to be a leader in its space, the most innovative company with the highest customer satisfaction. With a strong, talented, motivated, international team, Alon expects by then that Attunity will generate revenues of over $150 – $200M.
Values that propel Victory
Alon is a person who’s grounded in faith and believes that core values, motivation, and inspiration are drawn from family, culture and years of experience working with employees, customers, investors, partners and suppliers. Core values are what support the vision, shape the culture and reflect what the company values. They are the essence of the company’s identity. The key core values that Alon focuses on are ─ Integrity, Empowerment, Accountability, Innovation, Diversity and Commitment.
Alon believes that core values are becoming primary recruiting and retention tools. In the business marketplace, companies that want to build a loyal and growing customer community do so most effectively when they demonstrate their core values and allow their community to build and engage around it. Establishing strong core values provides both internal and external advantages to the company. Especially in this competitive world, having a set of specific core values that speak to the customers is definitely a competitive advantage.
Custom-made Spectrum of Solutions
Attunity is the choice for any company building Data Lakes, Hadoop and Cloud solutions. They make all data available and ready for analytics in diverse platforms and complex environments on-premises or in the Cloud. Attunity’s data integration and Big Data management software solutions enable availability, delivery, and management of data across heterogeneous enterprise platforms, organizations, and the cloud. Their flagship solution, Attunity Replicate, empowers organizations to accelerate data replication, data ingestion, and real-time data streaming across all major databases, data warehouses, big data platforms, and the cloud.
Overall, Attunity solutions, which also include Attunity Compose, Attunity Visibility and Attunity GoldClient, stand out over the competition because they automate and simplify complex, manual tasks and processes.Their solutions are also economical and fast. The fact that they are agile and independent means a lot to customers because they are better able to enable the most tightly-integrated technologies possible within existing architectures for the best value.
Words of Wisdom from Shimon Alon
The insights from various walks of businesses have brought Alon two life-changing pieces of advice. The first advice was to always have more dreams than memories. Leaders should look forward and not backward. Have visions and dreams, not just memories from previous successes. The second advice was to always take responsibility for your actions.Look to yourself to find solutions to problems instead of giving excuses. The business world is wide open and presents outstanding opportunities. Seek out companies with excellent leadership, strong vision and values. Set your expectations high; find people whose integrity and values you respect; get their agreement on a course of action, and give them your ultimate trust.
