Avalara Appoints Doug Burgum to Board of Directors
Bainbridge Island, WA (PRWEB) March 03, 2014 -- Avalara, Inc., (http://www.Avalara.com), a leading cloud-based sales tax and compliance automation technology provider, today announced it has appointed nationally known entrepreneur and investor Doug Burgum to its board of directors.
Burgum is currently a founding partner of Arthur Ventures, a Fargo, North Dakota-based venture capital firm focused on software companies. He also serves as chairman of the board of Atlassian, a leading enterprise software company, and as executive chairman of the board of Intelligent InSites, Inc., a leading provider of healthcare operational intelligence software.
Best known by many for building and leading Great Plains Software Inc. to prominence as the leading mid-market accounting solution provider, Burgum and his team guided the company through its highly successful initial public offering in 1997 and its acquisition by Microsoft for $1.1 billion in 2001. With a combination of vision and values, and a deep focus on partners and customers, Great Plains was a perennial member on Fortune’s ‘100 Best Companies to Work For’ list.
Burgum then served as corporate officer and senior vice president at Microsoft from 2001 to 2007, growing the company’s Business Solutions Group and its Dynamics product lines into a powerful worldwide ecosystem of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solutions.
He also has served as an investor and chairman of the board of SuccessFactors, a cloud-based leader in business execution software, which SAP acquired for $3.4 billion in 2012.
A graduate of North Dakota State University who earned his MBA from Stanford University Graduate School of Business, Burgum then worked at McKinsey & Co. in Chicago. Returning to North Dakota in 1983, he mortgaged his own farm land to provide the initial seed capital for Great Plains.
“Great Plains was our first integration 10 years ago and it helped Avalara become what it is today. As a long-time admirer of Doug’s leadership, I couldn’t be more pleased to welcome him to Avalara’s board of directors,” said Avalara founder and CEO Scott McFarlane. “We believe Doug’s exceptional background in building transformational technology companies will help us in our goal of accelerating what we believe is inevitable: the automation of the transactional tax compliance process for every business.”
“Avalara delivers strong value for customers every single day by taking the complexity of compliance and making it simple, and they achieve this through their highly scalable solutions and dedicated work with a broad array of the very best solution partners,” said Burgum. “This is a company with the right solutions, the right values, and a strong leadership position in a growing market - and they all wear orange to work every day. What’s not to like?”
Avalara pioneered a web-based compliance platform for sales tax automation nearly a decade ago and now provides a complete set of transactional tax compliance services for businesses of all sizes. Today its SaaS solution integrates into numerous ERP systems, accounting packages, ecommerce shopping carts, Point of Sale systems, and mobile payment platforms.
In 2013 Avalara once again was acknowledged as one of the fastest growing companies in North America via its inclusion on Deloitte’s 2013 Technology Fast 500™, a list of the 500 fastest growing technology, media, telecommunications, life sciences and clean technology companies in North America. Avalara earned this recognition by growing fiscal year revenue over 400 percent from 2008 to 2012.
About Avalara
Avalara makes sales and VAT tax compliance simple and automatic for thousands of customers worldwide every day. Each year its SaaS-based transactional tax compliance automation software solutions deliver billions of tax decisions, manage millions of exemption certificates, file hundreds of thousands of sales tax returns, and remit billions of dollars to state and local taxing authorities.
Recognized as one of America’s fastest growing technology companies, Avalara is integrated with leading ERP and ecommerce software systems that serve millions of businesses worldwide. Founded in 2004 and privately-held, Avalara’s venture capital investors include Battery Ventures, Sageview Capital, Arthur Ventures, and other institutional and individual investors. Avalara employs more than 500 people at its headquarters on Bainbridge Island, WA and in offices across the U.S. and in London, England and Pune, India. More information at: http://www.avalara.com.
Sheri Pollock, Avalara, http://www.avalara.com, +1 206.769.1780, [email protected]
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