Vertiba leads the pack on way to the cloud

BOULDER – In an industry stacked with competition, one customer-service management company stormed to the front of the field since its inception.

Boulder-based Vertiba Inc. posted a 268 percent growth in recent years, with revenue jumping from $1.778 million in 2011 to $6.558 million in 2013. That ranked the company second in BizWest’s Mercury 100 list of fastest-growing companies in Boulder and Broomfield counties for companies reporting more than $2 million in annual revenue.

Vertiba helps clients tailor Salesforce.com – the 15-year-old, massive cloud computing service – to their individual needs.

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“We gather all the requirements up front with the clients, build the system, help test it, integrate it with other systems, then provide training to their users on how it all works,” said Jim Hooton, chief executive and co-founder of Vertiba.

Hooton and Ted Battreall, Vertiba’s president and co-founder, started Vertiba in 2010. Since then, both Salesforce.com and Vertiba saw explosive growth, Hooton said. The partnership is one key ingredient to Vertiba’s success.

“I tell people we’re jockeys riding a really fast horse,” Hooton said, but with hundreds of other companies working similarly with Saleforce.com, Vertiba stands out as a top contender.

“There are more than 600 companies like us globally, and we are at the very top of customer satisfaction across the whole ecosystem,” Hooton said.

Vertiba works with businesses of all sizes across a range of industries. It serves the Rocky Mountain region, including Colorado, Utah and several surrounding states.

Salesforce.com started as a cloud computing service primarily for business-to-business interactions, but its flexibility now allows Vertiba to customize it to a variety of industries. Vertiba specializes in serving health0care and governmental agencies. The health-care sector often has dated technology that badly needs updating.

“They are leapfrogging and going to cloud computing,” Hooton said, “and we’re helping them do it.”

Vertiba also works with government agencies such as the state of Colorado. Vertiba helps create databases used to track details such as cases of elder abuse, grants and details about the thousands of job appointments made by the governor each year.

The company distanced itself from its competition with a triple threat of skills, Hooton said.

“Good client relationships, a deep knowledge of the product and a really efficient process is really why we’ve grown,” Hooton said.

The company emphasizes listening to and assessing clients’ needs, he said, then providing the tools they want.

Capitalizing on its work in the health-care sector, Hooton said, Vertiba recently expanded outside the region by moving into California. He added that there’s more to come.

“We’re taking our strength in the health-care and the public-sector industries and using that to expand throughout the West,” Hooton said. It’s the perfect time to connect with cloud companies, too, he said, as businesses shed old-technology infrastructure.

“Salesforce.com itself is a great product,” he said, “and cloud computing is really where everybody is headed.”