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FRED W. WRIGHT JR.New position: Senior vice president, sales, CommerceQuest Inc., Tampa; Previous position: Vice president, global sales, Avao Corp., Dallas.
Quite appropriately, Herbert Till starts his workday running. "I try to get in exercise before I start," he said. "I can't afford to be out of shape or out of breath at the end of the day."
As senior vice president of sales for CommerceQuest, Till will be running a lot. He will keep his primary office in Tampa and a suboffice - and home - in Dallas.
"Most of my interaction will be with customers and prospects," he said. "Most of my time will be on the road."
Till said his focus will be "to drive revenue for the company in sales," introducing the company's business process management software to Fortune 500 and Fortune 1000 companies nationwide.
"BPM is just coming into its fruition right now," he said. "It's been around for a few years. It's just now getting traction. In the next six to eight months, I expect to see a large surge of corporations adopting BPM software format."
BPM software, Till explained, integrates a lot of software applications corporations already have instead of requiring the purchase of an entire new, integrated suite of software. "The business leaders of the corporations are now driving change where before we found it was the IT driving change," he said. "The business people are now saying, "I've let my IT people run my organization and they haven't delivered. Now I have an opportunity to drive the business the way the business needs to be run, not dictated to by IT.' It's a different viewpoint."
Till estimates he will be traveling 60 to 80 percent of his workweek, coast to coast. He's been doing such business travel for more than 20 years, he said. And each day, he starts by exercising.
"I'm an avid jogger," he said. "I run three to five miles in the morning. That keeps me going. I watch what I eat. I have to, even on the road. I don't have a choice. I need to be disciplined."
Technology has always been a part of Till's professional life. "From day one," he said. Till graduated from Ramapo College in Mahwah, N.J., in 1979 with a bachelor's degree in business administration and computer science. He began his career as an application programmer, writing software.
Till worked for several large software companies, including Wang Laboratories "where I sunk my teeth in, where I really got into technology (and) customer-basing." He also worked for several solutions software companies, including Mercator Software, Oracle, PeopleSoft and webMethods.
Till came to CommerceQuest from Avao Corp., a BPM software provider in Dallas, where he was vice president of global sales. There, he managed sales operations in North America and Europe.
Till said he doesn't write computer code anymore. But his programming background "afforded me the ability to understand, from the ground up, what the technology can afford a customer. I developed from ground zero."
Till said he is "excited about the new technology. I've never been around technology such as this. This technology is very revolutionary in nature and (it) will make a very large impact on how companies will drive business."
Till, 46, also is on the board of directors of SigmaFlow, a business process modeling startup in Dallas.
When he's not on the road for business, he attends car shows and races sponsored by the Sports Car Club of America. "I'm an avid car enthusiast," he says. The cars range from smaller stock car class racers to high-performance Porches, he said.
While he does not own a racing car, he has leased and raced them. "You pay a fee to race a car for the weekend," he said. The SCCA also sponsors racing schools that allow fans "to get behind the wheels," racing at speeds up to 150 mph, Till said. Typically, he added, he tends to finish in the top 10.
Till and his wife, Patty, have a son, Griffin, 4.