By Bob Nagro
An overflow crowd of 250 in
the Citrix auditorium in Fort Lauderdale Thursday evening might have thought they
were in Boston or Silicon
Valley. Despite a rainy
night with terrible traffic, they had come from as far away as Kendall and
Jupiter to hear a South Florida Technology Alliance panel of local technology
leaders talk about Big Data. Consider
what they saw and heard.
The meeting was held at the glass tower headquarters of Citrix, the world-class company founded here 24 years ago, the company that brings you Go-to-Meeting. The panel, all from Broward or Palm Beach Counties, was made up of three highly successful serial entrepreneurs and the head of data analysis for Office Depot, another world-class company headquartered in the area, that does $4 Billion per year of on line sales. They were:
**John Duffy,**the CEO of 3C Interactive, recently named the “The Most Promising Company in America” by Forbes magazine.
**John Ferber,**who sold his first company Advertising.com to AOL for $496 Million and holds many of the key patents in e-commerce.
**Zee Aganovic,**the CEO of HiConversion, a leader in Web optimization, who sold his last company to Microsoft. Zee also holds a Ph.D in optimization theory.
Brian Wood**,** the director of Business Intelligence at Office Depot. With over $12 Billion in revenue Office Depot also runs one of the worlds largest eCommerce sites depending on Business Intelligence and optimization.
They talked about the cutting-edge ways their local companies are helping their customers grow their sales through the use of “big data analysis” - not just add targeting but things like real time A:B tested website optimization and combining web and in-store results to understand the full impact of website advertising – work that is being done here in South Florida.
This was the sort of meeting everyone expects to be held in the leading tech centers. But here in South Florida we are surprised because we don't talk about our local success enough. Even people in South Florida don't know how much is going on around here, so we shouldn't expect investors, entrepreneurs and tech business executives from around the country to know.
We have to tell people how successful we really are.
Bob is a partner at Next Horizon Communications, a corporate communications strategy, PR and advertising firm in South Florida. He has been involved in the tech community for many years as an entrepreneur and investment banker.