Claris boss looking to add thousands of developers

The CEO of Claris has outlined an ambitious plan to grow its developer base by hundreds of thousands as the workplace specialist looks to ramp up the business.

The name Claris, familiar to anyone in the channel with more than a decade or two under their belt, has returned and replaced FileMaker as a clear signal that the Apple-owned firm is planning to do things slightly differently under the leadership of CEO Brad Freitag.

One thing that Freitag has not had to do since he took up the CEO role six months ago is particularly fix anything with all the metrics going in the right direction.

“I stepped into the role with a sense of a significant market opportunity. We have this incredible customer base and a million active users subscribed and 1,500 partners globally,” he said.

Digital transformation, which often starts with projects in the workplace  category, is fuelling his optimism about the current and future prospects for Claris. Users are looking to make changes in their workflows and processes and want solutions that are affordable and can be delivered in fairly short time frames.

One of the main ways that Freitag believes the firm can add more value for customers is through its network of developers. The business currently works with around 50,000 but the ambition is to triple that in just a few years.

“We want to grow the professional developer community to 150,000 in the next three to four years and have to bring the existing community along with us,” he said.

Claris is up against some pretty stiff competition, but the CEO views the likes of Salesforce, Google and Microsoft as helping validate the market and not as giants that could knock it our of the ring.

“If you look at what we have done for decades we have taken the complexities out of technology and made it usable and available for teams, groups, mid-size firms and departments and have done that for decades,” he added “In each case [when a rival is] coming after us it is not a new battle for us and we continue to invest.”

Some of that investment is going to be in the form of acquisitions and Freitag recently inked the decision to purchase Stamplay, which provides connectors for developers to help the flow of data between cloud-based services and apps.

“With the roadmap and through acquisitions we can do everything relevant for our community and we have to give the channel every incentive for staying on board with us,” he added “there are new opportunities for channel partners.”

As Claris adds more depth to its portfolio and embraces the fruits of a larger developer community the business is committed to keeping its channel partners up to speed.

“We talk about from learning to earning. We have an incredibly relevant platform and product roadmap and an ecosystem of developers with all the resources to expand that at scale,” said Freitag.