Exclusive Interview with Conor Winders, Executive Vice President of Product and Engineering at Administrate

Administrate is helping the world's most forward-thinking companies to level up through learning. This platform enables companies worldwide to optimize their training operations and enables more efficient learning and development, helping customers and partners level up their teams and processes through learning. This software is a SaaS product built for scale and extensibility, essentially a hub for training operations, that can be used both with internal training departments or companies providing external training.

1. Kindly brief us about the company, its specialization,/ and the services that your company offers.                

In short, Administrate is helping the world's most forward-thinking companies to level up through learning. Our platform enables companies worldwide to optimize their training operations and enables more efficient learning and development, helping customers and partners level up their teams and processes through learning. This software is a SaaS product built for scale and extensibility, essentially a hub for training operations, that can be used both with internal training departments or companies providing external training. Operational administrators use our platform to drastically improve efficiency by the automation of repeatable tasks, as well as robust reporting that allows them to tie the impact of training directly to business outcomes.

We are a remote-first, global company with hubs in the U.K., North America, and Lebanon. With a diverse and talented team, we are committed to building the Ultimate Human Organization through how we work together and with our partners. We believe our people are the key to our success and that we can change the world together. 

2. How do you see the company and the industry in the future ahead?

The potential for what we are doing at Administrate is enormous, and the opportunity to make a real impact on the world is exhilarating. With each customer that we engage with, we are creating more case studies that demonstrate our ability to optimize an organization's training operations and positively impact business outcomes. There's a tremendous upside in leveling up your team from an employee engagement and retention perspective, and Administrate plays a unique role in this area.

The learning and development industry fosters amazing user experiences and gives learners more opportunities to self-direct and grow. We strongly believe in what we're doing at Administrate, and it's clear that other organizations are coming to the same realization. The great thing is that we are ahead of the curve and the market opportunity is there for us to make an impact in a meaningful way.

3. What does your technology and business roadmap look like for the rest of the year?

Over the last few quarters, we have focused on ensuring that we are always tackling the most important deliverables, bringing the most value to the market for our customers and our business. This means making investments across high-level themes such as:

• Strategic – How do we make sure we are constantly delivering new value to customers and getting to market with new capabilities and winning new customers?
• Scalability – How we invest in technology to support our growth in the future.
• Stability – How we ensure that our customers today are getting the best service possible.

By using this approach to ensure that we are delivering great and sustainable experiences, we are moving both our technology and innovation strategies forward at all times. 

For the rest of this year, some of our biggest bets will be focused around our integrations platform, allowing our customers to quickly and easily plug Administrate in with the rest of their software ecosystem. Integrations are really important for several reasons: it enables customers to get multiplicative benefits from the software and systems they already use alongside Administrate, ultimately reducing duplication and overheads while increasing automation. In addition, by integrating with other software and taking advantage of Administrate's robust reporting capabilities, companies also unlock the ability to really understand the ROI that training and "leveling up" can deliver.

We are also incredibly excited about a new product offering we are bringing to market later this year, one that we believe will be transformative in our industry. We have an entire product team devoted to solving some of the most manual and labor-intensive tasks that training departments and organizations come up against in delivering content at scale. Right now we are actively demoing and refinding these new capabilities with existing customers, iterating based on feedback, and preparing for a go-to-market in the coming months.

4. How are disruptive technologies like IoT/Big Data analytics/AI/Machine Learning/Cloud Computing impacting today's innovation?  

Before Administrate, I led engineering for one of the largest IoT platforms in the world and while that knowledge and experience aren't directly comparable to where Administrate is at today, it is exciting to think about how transformative it could be in the future. When you consider complex training requirements, particularly instructor-led training or in-person events, there is very often a need for physical resources as part of a course. Administrate already provides functionality to help understand what resources are needed, what is available, where it is, etc – but looking ahead at the potential of IoT platforms and asset tracking, so much more could be automated and optimized. The beauty of Administrate is how extensible the platform is: we literally built it to integrate with and take advantage of other data sources to enable better decision-making.

Leveraging other data sources becomes even more exciting when you consider advanced analytics, intelligence, and machine learning. Administrate can already help customers deliver better outcomes for their business by optimizing their training programs, but this stretches things much further. I can see a day where the Administrate system can identify trends, provide insights and recommendations, or even optimize training plans – all based on the data and learnings within it.

5. What is the edge your company has over other players in the industry?

Administrate's edge is its relevant data, both the richness of our data model and the volume. For many of our most successful customers and partners, the Administrate platform is one of their most extensive resources for critical business data. Because we have always designed Administrate to be at the center of a training department's world, we have provided a hub and home for all of the data they need to succeed. Whether through our integration strategy, our API strategy, or the ease of use of the platform itself, our customers and their teams have been able to optimize their work and deliver outcomes by having a place to leverage their critical data that can often get lost inside endless spreadsheets and documents. However, a great data model and lots of data are useless without tangible ways to leverage that data to improve your business. Our customers can view side-by-side whether a particular training course delivers more sales, and whether a specific instructor leads to a better end-user. The analytics provide insights into whatever a business is trying to achieve. Our data and reporting capabilities make it easy to understand what training levers can be pulled and what is their impact. There is nobody in our industry that can deliver this today and even more exciting, with the products we have in the works we feel we are just at the beginning of what we can offer.

6. How does your company's rich expertise help uncover patterns with powerful analytics and machine learning?        

Administrate is unique because we have an intuitive understanding of what problems our customers and partners actually have, and how software can help to solve them. That mindset is in our DNA. When you factor in the data and integrations strategy there is a powerful coming together of domain expertise and the technology required to scale it. Advanced analytics and machine learning are only truly valuable when you know what to look for and you have the data in which to look – this is where we excel. We are looking at the bigger picture of how an effective training and development program can help a business achieve better results.