Jeffrey Greenberg

Libgo, a holding company for Liberty Travel and GoGo Worldwide Vacations in the increasingly competitive travel industry, approached us to solve what appeared to be a problem created by a long series of missteps by previous consultants.” Both Liberty Travel, the inventor of the “travel package,” and GoGo Vacations, a wholesaler of leisure vacations, are widely recognized as industry leaders in their segments. As a result, both have valuable brands which require scalable technology to handle, in the case of Liberty Travel, 200 locations in 25 states with 3000 agents, and, in the case of GoGo Vacations, agents from more than 18,000 agencies. GoGo Vacations provides private-label vacations for four major airlines, including all the packages and technology for American Airlines Vacations.

Libgo had committed to improving its systems even as new competitors, entirely web-based, put up sites designed to lessen the importance of human contact and travel agents in the industry. The Libgo directive was to build a state-of-art system that would be acknowledged as industry-leading for direct selling to consumers, to support travel agents and to provide technology and other travel products to third parties. An enormous undertaking--one that over several years and with expenditures in the tens of millions of dollars--had initial successes in moving to a modern ERP solution, but the overall program was taking too long and had gone over budget. The executive team brought Inventivity on board to get the project back on track.

Cathy Peleaz, President of Liberty Travel, said, “The Inventivity team provided our executives with feedback that was unbiased and refreshingly candid. Their recommendations and clear action plan gave us the strategic vision we needed to bring the project back on track and realize successes.” Our Inventivity team took on the role of de facto CIO and CTO, with responsibility for a $40 million annual budget and 200 staff members. In short order, Inventivity revamped technology strategy, renegotiated contracts, purchased code and put the company back in charge of its own systems and processes destiny. We were not ‘travel experts,’ but we knew that this was a ‘partnership-driven’ industry, so we enlisted customers as well as the Liberty teams' knowledge and identified the highest value features and we went to work on them immediately.

Inventivity’s team improved IT morale by supporting the folks in the trenches and hired senior IT staff to provide leadership. The result was refocused and simplified processes, improved processes and the creation of a realistic path aimed at value creation for the department.

(now Rovi Corp)

Working with high profile, market leaders requires both technical excellence and a thorough understanding of the need to provide absolutely seamless transitions and software. So, when we were approached by Sonic Solutions, the leader in digital media software, we took on the project with the full understanding of what was at risk. And as often happens, what we initially set out to do was overshadowed by the exigencies of the assignment.

We were called in to perform Linux consulting services, but we quickly concluded that we needed to provide a solution that would help both Sonic and its client, Sony. Sonic had tasked a recent acquisition with providing DVD and other key technology to Sony’s premier DVR product line. During our initial discussions we observed that project management and process within Sonic made this delivery much more difficult and that Sony’s timelines were unrealistic.

After bootstrapping a port of Sonics’ Windows-based source code to Linux, we worked with the VP of Engineering to improve project management to ensure the project’s overall success. The Inventivity team successfully delivered to Sony, which led to additional efforts and an engagement with Hitachi and other consumer electronics vendors for Sonic.

Sonic then turned to us for additional projects and process improvements. Within 60 days we had achieved positive ROI for the efforts. During this time, Sonic experienced rapid growth and has since successfully delivered technology to the likes of Microsoft, Sony, Hitachi, Dell and others.

Sonic also enlisted the Inventivity team for its entry into the embedded system space, providing leadership in product and project management. Inventivity managed the production of the strategic program plan involving the VPs of Marketing, Engineering, Advanced Technology and the CTO. The team launched the first series of projects including staffing the team, managing the project, establishing an outsourcer selection process and hiring and managing the outsourcer.

Later, Sonic asked Inventivity to participate in M&A due diligence of acquisitions by evaluating target teams and their processes, and providing recommendations for smoothly integrating them within Sonic.

Inventivity was born out of a variety of needs: finding a way to work on creative assignments and leading work, working on strategic problems that mix technology, management and business, wanting to work with great people to build a self-sustaining community that could help each other and build long-term relationships with customers and co-workers. I’d built a startup in NYC and a small services business, too, but Silicon Valley has a much deeper pool of talent and backgrounds in technology.

Inventivity became a formal way to sell my services, but with some elements that would make it more sustainable for me and my consulting peers. It allowed for a combination of minimal risk by taking cash as payment, but also a longer term investment by payment through equity. It’s a way to participate on the upside and take a deeper engagement with the company, more in harmony with the aims of the senior management and employees. This means that we often come in at odds with large consulting firms, as we’re not incented to sell bodies, but we’re after the greater good of company and its workforce.

We come in selling metrics, processes, and efficiency, on top of deep expertise in software, architecture and systems, and the experiences of founding and running and helping many product oriented companies. So we understand the urgency of innovative and effective product development, and what it takes for robust, high quality and cost-effective systems management. We understand what employees are challenged with and how to help them do it, and get on the line with them as need be to fill gaps.

Over the last six years, this model has allowed us to take on assignments ranging from fresh projects to having to come in and stop hemorrhaging caused by unsuccessful internal programs or, worse yet, having to clean up where previous consultants have recommended the wrong courses of action. It’s the cases where we have found and illuminated the possibilities for improvement, that are the most exciting. When the client really gets the direction and takes it over and owns it. That’s the best.

Immediately after the breakup of the Bell System (AT&T), seven regional telecommunications companies were formed, with Verizon becoming the entity that provided service in the northeastern U.S. NYNEX and NYNEX Science and Technology were the subsidiaries of Verizon charged with the responsibility for providing all the telecom services (business and residential) in the region.

I put together and directed the team that architected all the work stations and infrastructure for residential telephone service in the northeast U.S. The task here was to integrate several former local Bell Operating Companies with enormous customer bases in a seamless transition. We successfully managed the core software teams while improving connectivity and efficiencies under intense media, regulatory and public scrutiny.

Hewitt: Architecting large web-scale systems & serving as consulting CTO

Hewitt is a global HR consulting company that also provides HR oursourcing to Fortune 50 companies. Millions of employees rely on Hewitt’s systems to manage their health and insurance benefits. The company also provides HR information such as the Fortune’s 100 best companies to work for.

Inventivity was engaged,through Scient, a leading e-business consultancy, to participate in the inception of a new business starting from early business strategy discussions to development of the first implementation.

The new business required serving up to 20 million users employed by hundreds of companies near the end of the year when they all need to enroll in health plans and thus the system would need to tolerate enormous peak usage.

To do this, Inventivity assessed Hewitt’s already substantial technology organization (1700 people) and systems in order to develop a technology strategy that could meet these requirements. “It turned out they had substantial expertise in building and operating large-scale systems, however, they lacked the knowledge and the culture to build a second system, web-based and serving the general public in a short time,” said Jeffrey Greenberg.

“We provided deep technical experience and organized and led very talented architects to design and size a system that could meet their needs” he said. Working with business thought leaders and project management staff, Inventivity created an organization to design the web-system and the staff to build it. The Inventivity team was able to mediate between the client and a large consultancy hired to implement a vision.

On this assignment, both a new system and technology organization were built from scratch. To do this, Inventivity served as the virtual CTO of the organization.

“We gained credibility with the client and the development outsource team because we clearly outlined the challenges they would be facing and helped them to arrive at realistic dates and scope,” said Greenberg. With an overall team size of about 120 people and a development organization of 80, the internal organizational challenges were also intense. “We acted as a neutral third party, at once mediating and leading a hungry client with very high standards and a driving but young outsourcing team.”

Investor Growth Capital: Technical Due Diligence for a $3 billion, expansion state venture firm

Investor Growth Capital was interested in investing in a late-stage telecommunications startup focused on helping large-scale businesses reduce their telecommunications costs through innovations in usage tracking and contract negotiations with telecomunications carriers like AT&T. IGC is an independent venture capital firm specializing in expansion-stage investments in technology and healthcare. With more than $3 billion invested in 250+ companies worldwide, the 17-year old company is focused building value over time. Noah Walley, a Managing Director, at the firm reached out to Mr. Greenberg to perform technical due diligence as part of their business assessment.

Inventivity's Jeffrey Greenberg joined the business due diligence team at the client location and quickly probed all aspects of the product technology: it’s staff, operations, processes in a two-day technical assessment. “Starting with the startup's presentations, we assessed the experience of the key leadership, the key development and operational processes, and risks in this technical product with a multi-year horizon. Our assessment of the product's short and long term risks, the potential for unexpected costs, and other key issues was translated for use by the investment team in evaluating whether to commit capital to this business”, said Mr. Greenberg.

Shortly after, IGC did invest, and the company did an IPO a on the Nasdaq exchange.

OmOrganics.org & FarmsReach.com: Founder needs a CTO boost

Melanie Cheng is a startup founder with a passion for local food, local farms, and healthy food. She had worked with an outsourcer to develop here innovative vision for improving the efficiencies of local food producers and food distribution. And she was facing some challenges with getting her vision accomplished. She contacted Inventivity's Jeffrey Greenberg to get help on assessing the development situation and what moves to make next. "It was a tense time in which a non-technical founder is trying to get their business in motion, and an outsourcer is trying to understand and execute on the vision. And sometimes the two don't connect so well. Melanie contacted us to provide some outside technical management eyes to the situation, and provide some options to keep things moving in the right direction".

We stepped in and helped her to move ahead with the situation, and helped her to focus on hiring a CTO to help her succeed with her vision. "It's always a pleasure to help startups that working so earnestly to do good, and we were able to help move her ahead".