Marc Johnson, a tech stalwart with over two decades of experience in developing web, mobile, and backend data solutions across many industries ranging from Banking, Insurance, Manufacturing, Retail, and Utilities is the CEO and Co-Founder of Team Central.
His professional journey highlights how he accidentally landed in business school, where he pursued Information Systems, which later changed the course of his life and led him to where he is today. Currently, spearheading the role and responsibilities of a CEO, Marc aims to make TeamCentral a market leader in Automation Technology.
The Initial Journey
Marc wasn’t any tech wizard with a natural “computer nerdiness”. In reality, it was quite the opposite, he didn’t play video games when he was young and his parents did not purchase a Commodore. Midway through college, Marc was still a lost soul but ended up in the business school at the University of Cincinnati studying Information Systems. He adds, “I was good at math and interested in business, so it seemed like a decent fit.”
One of the first courses Marc was required to take was an introduction to C++, and that was the point in time where the “fire was lit”. He experienced a spark that later added more fuel and became an interest. At the same time, a wave called the internet was flowing, and so it kind of became this perfect storm for Marc. He could now see a career at this intersection between technology and business.
When Marc graduated from college, he started working in online banking systems. For beginners, it was a great place to “cut your teeth”, and learn some essential skills. Then, he got into consulting. He always had “side” projects where he was testing new languages and platforms. This ignited his lamp and soon he developed a passion for building his business.
Summoning up his business journey, he added, “I helped start an IoT business before that acronym was a thing that fizzled with the dot com bubble and then tried to create a “robo-advisor” in the Fintech space, which also failed. TeamCentral ironically is kind of a combination of parts of those products.”
TeamCentral: The Next-Generation Automation Technology
The core of what the company offers is a data management platform called “Central”. It is a “no code” platform meaning it does not require deep programming expertise to build on top of it. The main problem, TeamCentral solves is something it affectionately refers to as “data chaos”. Data chaos occurs as companies grow and purchase information systems to run their business. Chaos happens because the core business processes become dependent on the accuracy of data across systems, but NONE of those systems are designed to work well with one another.
Solving data chaos is all about synchronizing and managing the quality of customer, employee, and vendor data that needs to exist across in some cases 10-20 different systems. Finding and retaining top IT talent is often a tedious task and so Central makes it possible to build in some cases very complex data integrations without writing a single line of code.
Initiating an Impactful Change
TeamCentral is at its nascent stages of incredible change for “information workers” of which there are 93M just in the US. This includes everyone from the executives who run the business to the back-office people who run the Accounting, Finance, HR, and IT organizations.
AI technology that is currently being developed will impact in some way all 93M of those people. The opportunity Marc wants to create is a way of giving all of those people a sort of superpower to be more productive in their jobs.
Explaining with a perfect example, Marc states, “If you had an assistant who understood your role in the company, whom you worked with, who your customers were, your current projects, etc., and then provided ways to take things off your plate or do things faster than you could do yourself, that would free up employees to be even more focused on greater opportunities for business value. That is the space TeamCentral is looking to become a leader for.”
Making a Difference
Marc believes to understand one’s position on differentiation, they have to look back to the foundational problem. And for TeamCentral it’s data chaos. The reason this has become such a critical problem is the amount of data used to run a company has grown significantly faster than the number of people on the planet with IT knowledge to support it. The products that have typically been used to solve data problems are huge and heavy and require an extensive IT background to use them.
In 2024-2015, TeamCentral was prompt to observe the transition towards no code or citizen developer products. These products were comparatively easy to use and in simpler terms more “user-friendly”. However, the issue with such products that Marc recognized was they often only solved parts of the problems and with time things kept getting worse.
When Marc and his team launched Central, they identified a gap and saw an opportunity to build a data platform that had the enterprise-grade capabilities to be highly flexible and testable. The platform had to have built-in capabilities to manage version control, deployment, and monitoring of system health. It must do all of those things PLUS have the simplicity of a citizen developer product. That is a huge challenge that will be solved over time, but that mindset alone is a huge differentiator for TeamCentral.
Stating TeamCentral’s mission, Marc adds, “The first part of our mission is to help create more IT builders in the world. Help individuals who may not have deep knowledge of databases, API, data protocols, etc. to build highly valuable data integration solutions. That is just table stakes for what we envision as a broader goal of providing solutions to assist information workers across the globe to be more productive, effective, and hopefully happier in their work lives.”
Overcoming Customer Challenges with Comprehensive and Cost-Effective Solutions
Marc reckons TeamCentral has two types of customers that are completely different but share the same problem. The first is the IT staff with limited resources trying to manage a backlog of requests from the business, and the second is the SaaS companies themselves that have trouble taking their product to market because it needs to integrate with other products in their eco-system. The company tackles that problem for both parties with its no-code approach that allows solutions to be brought to market faster and cheaper than the alternatives.
Promising Times Ahead
Corporate Data Quality and Automation are at the heart of what TeamCentral does, but that is just the starting point for a more comprehensive productivity platform. The company is now moving into a new phase in its product roadmap, where access to the data it is maintaining for its customers opens a whole set of new use cases.
Marc adds, “Think back to what I was alluding to before where every worker has a very personalized virtual work assistant.” Making that possible requires solutions to be able to search and discover insights buried in the data, to be able to automate typical daily tasks, and long term to become a strategic advisor to the individual.
In terms of the next five years, Marc aims to hit many milestones and continue to grow his company with leaps and bounds. For almost 20 years of Marc’s life, he worked for a company called Centric Consulting that was obsessed with employee and customer happiness. Following in their footsteps, Marc wants to imbibe the same approach at TeamCentral. He aims to continue growing a great team that enjoys and believes in what they are doing and makes the success of its customers the most important thing.
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