Fresh off the heels of Huddle’s $51 million Series D round of funding at the end of 2014 and a year of significant growth, the company appointed 20-year veteran Morten Brøgger as its new CEO, effective January 29, 2015. Huddle’s co-founder and current CEO, Alastair Mitchell, will take on a new role as President and CMO, focusing his efforts on scaling Huddle’s global brand and market impact.

Brøgger recently spoke to SiliconANGLE about his ambitions to build upon Huddle’s leadership position in cloud collaboration and further drive significant innovation and growth.

Q: How did your experience in mobility help you land this position?

Brøgger: My experience in mobile is in facilitating mobile operators, not on the user interface side, which was an area I wanted to get into. We want to fully integrate the user experience and maintain security. Joining a leading company and changing the way people work is an extremely interesting journey to be a part of. I see myself as an addition to the team.

My ambitions are to accelerate growth and put better processes in place around product marketing and sales. The way we want to do this is to pick our battles, pick core verticals and regions. And when we choose to enter those verticals, we want to do it right. We must understand the use cases, speak the language, whether it’s banking or healthcare, and know how to work best in those industries. The way to go is to be very focused.

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Q: What new territories and industries are you looking to break into?

Brøgger: We’re working on that and plan to target the federal and private sector.

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Q: Tell us about your ecosystem, partnerships, and sales.

Brøgger: We want to be more successful here. My philosophy is that you need to be very sharp to be the best partner and avoid low momentum. We want to better understand our role with our partner and collaboration opportunities and enable them to be successful on their own and with Huddle.

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Q: Where can Huddle go from here for the enterprise?

Brøgger: The thing about enterprise is that it always takes time. When you’re in the venture phase, time isn’t always on your side. Huddle has a good take on this, but we can improve. First, it’s about getting back to understanding what this business is about, understanding the pain points for the customer, and then articulating them in use cases.

We need to be able to clearly articulate why the customer needs our service, what differentiates us, and why they should buy now. If you can answer these well, you’re pretty far down the road.

We do early pilots to find areas where the pain points are high, and then we seek those out and solve them. We have deep dialogue with customers during pilots to also determine how to train users for huddle. That’s how we facilitate quick adoption early on, and customers see the immediate benefits.

The view from Brogger’s desk as Huddle CEO

Life Lessons

Q: What’s the most important lesson/s you’re bringing to Huddle from previous job experiences?

Brøgger: I’ve spent over 20 years in the technology industry, and come to Huddle from a cloud technology company that has become enormously successful with a recurring revenue model.  The content collaboration market, which has been dominated by Microsoft’s legacy SharePoint solution, is now being upended by similar SaaS solutions like Huddle that also use a recurring revenue model, and I’m exciting for the incredible market opportunity.

I previously led a company called MACH, which was acquired by Syniverse in 2013 for $715 million. Prior to becoming CEO at the time of the acquisition, I wore many hats at the company including chief operating officer and chief customer officer. I’m used to rolling up my sleeves and becoming involved at every level of a high growth company and am particularly excited to build on the processes and execution already in place at Huddle, particularly in sales, marketing, product management and product marketing.

Q: Who are three leaders that inspire your own CEO efforts at the office?

Brøgger: Richard Branson. He is a visionary who has set out to change entire industries and along the way, has changed how business gets done. He has extraordinary focus, leadership and results.

Guy Dubois. H was my predecessor as CEO at MACH and inspired me to become a CEO. Guy is an exceptional chief executive that drives remarkable results and and is committed to empowering each of his employees to achieve greatness.

Steve Jobs. He demonstrated unparalleled dedication to the project – whatever it takes!

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Q: iPhone or Android?

Brøgger: Both

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Q: Are you a night owl or a day breaker?

Brøgger: Both! When you work in a global environment, it’s necessary. But I prefer being a day breaker!

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Q: What’s the bell for in the office? (Image above)

Brøgger: When we are closing BIG deals it rings a sweet sounding ring ;-)