Tracey Mustacchio

Tracey Mustacchio brings more than 20 years of marketing, business development and product management experience to Vivisimo. In her current role as Vice President of Marketing at Vivisimo, Tracey is responsible for the company’s global marketing initiatives, including its go-to-market and product strategies. Prior to joining Vivisimo, Tracey served as Chief Marketing Officer for TraceSecurity, an innovative SaaS-based security compliance provider. Previous to TraceSecurity, Tracey held senior level marketing and product management positions at McAfee, Verisign, Secure Software (acquired by Fortify Software), and Business Evolution (acquired by Kana). During her tenure at McAfee, she led product marketing and product management for all product lines which played a pivotal role in growing revenue from $25 million to more than $900 million. At Business Evolution, she successfully positioned the company as a strategic eCRM provider and was instrumental in the company’s sale to Kana Communication for $140 million. Tracey also operated her own strategic marketing consultancy which specialized in providing marketing and product management consulting to fast growing companies. Tracey earned B.A. degrees in Math/Computer Science and Philosophy from Virginia Wesleyan College where she graduated as 1 of 10 Wesleyan Scholars.

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Big Data Analytics: App-less Empowerment

Monday, May 14th, 2012

As the information economy continues to evolve, significant tension is growing between two opposing forces. On one hand, it is essential to keep increasing the empowerment of knowledge worker teams across the organization. For companies to run lean and mean, to ensure that they capitalize on any and all opportunities that may emerge in the market, and to rigorously drive down the risks associated with process or compliance failures, they must keep raising the bar when it comes to what users can do individually and collectively from their PCs, tablets and smartphones.

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Customer Experience as a Branding Strategy

Tuesday, March 27th, 2012

With more emphasis on customer experience, many companies are asking how we leverage customer experience as the foundation for creating an effective brand strategy. Apple and Steve Jobs have proven that this is indeed possible and a viable tactic. To humanize our brands we must take a closer look at how we interact with customers and identify the necessary steps to truly connect with our customers.

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Business on Board – Part II

Thursday, March 15th, 2012

In my last blog, I made some assertions about why it’s often difficult to get the business to understand and embrace technology solutions like those offered by Vivisimo—even though the business value delivered by those solutions can be considerable. That’s because the business rarely knows what it wants or needs when it comes to technology. IT doesn’t always do the best job of selling the value of technology internally and SaaS is enabling the business to more easily make its own bad technology decisions.

In this blog, I’d like to make some suggestions about how IT can facilitate good technology decisions by the business—so the business, IT and awesome technology vendors like Vivisimo can all come out winners.

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Business on Board

Thursday, March 8th, 2012

Vivisimo offers technology solutions that are of exceptional value to the business. Unfortunately, only IT people tend to read the blogs of technology companies like ours.

This doesn’t mean it’s unfortunate that you’re reading this blog right now if you’re an IT person. On the contrary, we very much appreciate the time you take to keep up with what we’re doing and what’s going on in the industry generally. But our solutions only have business value insofar as they deliver value to the business. So, like all technology companies, we have a problem: How do we get the business to hear about, understand, embrace and become the happy recipients of our value proposition?

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Making Complexity Your Friend

Monday, January 23rd, 2012

Our businesses are relentlessly becoming more complex. We are engaging with an expanding network of contractors and partners to get our work done. We are utilizing more diverse channels to reach more customers. We are operating in more countries and in more languages, while we wrestle with more regulations and market variables.

In one sense, this complexity is a dangerous enemy. Complexity can increase the probability that some process somewhere will break or that somebody will do something wrong. Orders get screwed up. Customers get ticked off. Revenue goes out the window.

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Committed to Wasting Time

Tuesday, December 27th, 2011

Innovation often feels risky. Typically, it entails committing significant resources to something that may not bring about the needed outcome. This uncertainty often causes decision-makers to shy away from innovation.

But as the rules governing business performance continue to mutate, it may be reasonable to look at innovation from the opposite direction: Why are we committing significant resources to something—in this case, the status quo—that will certainly not deliver the needed outcome?

And there is no doubt that our present IT solutions cannot deliver needed outcomes. As Andy McAfee, Principal Research Scientist at the MIT Sloan School of Management’s Center for Digital Business, recently explained, “We have collaboration tools that are not social, and social tools that are not collaborative.”

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Are You Future-Friendly?

Monday, December 12th, 2011

One of the most unfortunate casualties of the current economic downturn is the diminished ability and willingness of business leaders to think seriously and practically about the future. When you’re facing crises in revenue and margins today, there is a natural disinclination to think much about tomorrow. After all, if you don’t survive the present, it doesn’t much matter what’s going to happen in the long term.

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Monetizing Customer-Relevant Big Data

Monday, November 7th, 2011

Continuing the “Big Data” discussion Stacy started last week, I would like to touch on the area of monetizing customer-relevant big data.

Businesses of all sorts are accumulating data that does not easily lend itself to conventional database/data warehousing models. What they do and don’t do with this data can have a significant impact on their bottom-line business performance.

But it’s good to clarify two points about big data. First point: big data doesn’t just mean lots of data. According to the definition originally put forth by Gartner analyst Doug Laney in 2001, big data involves three attributes: volume, velocity (i.e. the speed at which it is accumulated and/or loses its freshness), and diversity of sources.

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Text Analytics, Social Media and the Art of Listening

Monday, September 26th, 2011

Social media is hot. Being intrinsically social creatures, we have embraced Facebook, Twitter and other forms of digital community at a startling pace. And businesses have jumped on the bandwagon—rightly recognizing that social media represent an epochal opportunity for better customer engagement.

Unfortunately, as is often the case, many marketing managers are thinking exclusively in terms of the messages they can push out to their customers—rather than capitalizing on a unique and powerful opportunity to understand their customers.

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