It’s been nothing but blue skies lately for John Annakin and ClearObject.
A leader in bringing enterprise applications to the cloud and providing a platform for IoT (Internet of Things) services and solutions, ClearObject (formerly CloudOne) has been named to Inc. Magazine’s list of the 5,000 fastest-growing private companies for three consecutive years.
As chief revenue officer for ClearObject, Annakin leads sales, customer success, partnering and marketing for the Fishers, Indiana-based organization and has played a key role in helping it rack up a three-year sales growth of 393 percent, placing it at No. 1009 on the 2016 list. Companies including Microsoft, Dell, Pandora, Timberland, LinkedIn, Yelp, Zillow and many other well-known names gained their first national exposure as honorees of the Inc. 5000.
The company also made Indianapolis Business Journal's "Fast 25" list of the fastest-growing companies in Indianapolis for 2015 and 2016 and marked its debut on the Indiana Chamber of Commerce’s 11th annual “Best Places to Work in Indiana” list in the small employer category for 2016.
At the heart of ClearObject’s success is its “IoT Lifecycle” model that helps companies define, design, develop, test, and ultimately unify their existing but frequently disconnected systems and components, Annakin says.
The company uses a combination of different technologies to enable collaborative development and data analytics while deploying software that enables the analysis of data in real-time, all on individual, secure, hybrid cloud environments.
“Breaking the model into categories allows us to evaluate and analyze the methods an organization uses to collect, store, analyze and visualize data. It helps us identify where there may be a bottleneck or opportunity within an existing system to introduce technology to best fill the space,” Annakin explains.
“When these components work together and data – many times coming from devices that are the ‘things’ in the Internet of Things – is run through this entire process, it emerges both actionable and profitable,” he says. “That has an immediate and innovative impact on the way our customers do business.”
And it’s a business that Annakin clearly knows how to do well.
With a bachelor’s degree in industrial management and a minor in computer science, he has 25 years of sales and sales management experience in the cloud managed services and software-as-a-service space.
“I think earning my degree in industrial management gave me more flexibility because it required more technical knowledge and a stronger foundation in math,” Annakin says. “My first job out of college was selling complex manufacturing software, so I fit right in and haven’t looked back.”