At seven in the morning, a job interview began at an airport. Alan J. Dabbiere was heading to Cincinnati for a client project. John Marshall, a Georgia Tech student considering work at Manhattan Associates, came along. The arrangement was unusual enough. Then the candidate asked why a much larger competitor had not crushed the little software company.
It was a fair question, delivered to a person with a plane to catch and a business to defend. Dabbiere remembered being taken aback. Marshall listened to the explanation, watched the customer's reaction and understood the proposition. He got the job. Years later, the two would help build AirWatch, which VMware acquired in a transaction announced at $1.54 billion. Some interviews require a clean shirt. This one required a boarding pass.
The encounter offers a useful place to begin with Dabbiere. His career crosses warehouse operations, enterprise mobility and privacy software. The products change. Certain people keep reappearing. So does a particular business problem: an organization has bought the technology, but someone still has to make all the pieces work together.
A company named for the wrong Manhattan
Manhattan Associates began in Manhattan Beach, California, in 1990. The name is a small geographical trap for anyone expecting a New York origin story. Its beginnings were closer to a shipping problem than a skyline.
Dabbiere was working at Kurt Salmon Associates, the consulting firm, when a project at clothing company Jockey brought him together with four Infosys specialists: Deepak Raghavan, Deepak Rao, Ponnambalam Muthiah and Prahalad Suresh. They saw weaknesses in the systems used to ship goods according to retailers' requirements. A problem at one customer suggested a business serving others.
Their early product was PkMS, the Pick Ticket Management System. Jockey became the first customer in 1991. Behind that modest acronym lay a practical observation: taking an order and successfully filling it are separate accomplishments. A retailer's expectations continue past the purchasing department and into the warehouse.
That distinction makes the business easier to understand. A shipment has to arrive in the form the customer expects. The packing, identification and handling requirements matter. An elegant computer system upstairs can coexist with an awkward process downstairs. The space between those two experiences is roomy enough to house a software company.
Dabbiere brought an unusual academic combination to that work: a bachelor's degree in chemistry and an MBA from Indiana University. His early consulting involved Quick Response studies examining how supply chains could operate in closer coordination. The scientific degree and business degree appear together on his résumé; the career that followed dealt with the less orderly chemistry of companies trying to agree.
Atlanta, by deliberate choice
In 1995, Manhattan moved to Atlanta. The company had 25 employees at the time. Three years later it completed its initial public offering. Dabbiere led the business as its founding president and chief executive, then continued as chairman through 2003.
The move deserves attention because Dabbiere later explained it in wonderfully practical terms. He wanted the Eastern time zone, access to talent around Georgia Tech, and an airport that could send employees wherever customers needed them. These are business considerations with a suitcase attached. Enterprise software often requires people who can understand a customer's operations and then turn up to help.
He remained an advocate for Atlanta even while living elsewhere. Speaking to the city's Rotary Club in 2013, he argued that workforce continuity helped companies grow. His concern was the ability to retain people who knew the product and the customer, rather than repeatedly starting the relationship from scratch.
At the same talk, he supplied a brisk answer to a question many founders would enjoy facing. If an investor offered $200 million for a 15 percent stake, he joked, “you take it.” The joke worked because the number was real: AirWatch had raised a $200 million Series A that year. There are occasions when a lengthy meditation on capital allocation can be mercifully abbreviated.
The colleague who became a partner
Marshall's later company began as Wandering WiFi in 2003, installing wireless hot spots for hospitality businesses. By 2006, he and his business partner disagreed about running it. Marshall sought advice from his former boss. When advice failed to settle the matter, Dabbiere bought out the partner and joined the business.
That sequence is more revealing than the polished shorthand of a founding biography. Dabbiere's entrance came through an existing relationship and an existing company. AirWatch emerged as the business shifted toward managing mobile devices. A person he had once recruited now supplied a reason to return to company building.
By 2009, Dabbiere was working an AirWatch booth at the FOSE government technology exhibition, shaking hands with prospects. It is an appealingly ordinary detail in a career often told through valuations. A successful first company did not remove the need to explain a second product to the next potential customer.
The connection also complicates the familiar portrait of the solitary founder. Customers, implementers, managers and former colleagues carried experience from one business to another. A product can begin again under a new name; professional trust has a longer memory.
The phone becomes the workplace
A revealing AirWatch project involved The Home Depot and 50,000 Windows mobile devices in 2010. Then Apple's iOS 4 arrived, making Apple devices more manageable for enterprises. AirWatch already understood the device-management problem. The expanding smartphone market gave that experience a much wider application.
The distinction matters. A phone is easy to admire in a shop. An organization deploying thousands of them needs to configure them, support them and control access to business information. Each attractive screen arrives with responsibilities. Multiply those responsibilities by a workforce and the accessory becomes infrastructure.
By early 2014, AirWatch had more than 10,000 customers and 1,600 employees across nine global offices. Dabbiere described mobile devices moving beyond email into training, payments, keys and entertainment. His ambition for AirWatch was that people and organizations could use this expanding collection of functions with less administrative friction.
He also talked about distributing brief, recurring lessons to employees, rather than reserving learning for quarterly meetings. That proposal fits the broader interest running through his work: tools should follow the activity. The warehouse, the store floor and the traveling employee each give software a different set of instructions.
Announced acquisition value. VMware completed the deal on February 24, 2014; consideration included cash and equity-related components.
The acquisition gave the story a highly visible financial milestone. The daily work behind it was considerably less photogenic. Customers needed devices to function; employees needed colleagues who could make decisions; the company needed to expand internationally. The large number describes the transaction. The operating problems explain why the business existed.
A founder who remembers his mistakes
Dabbiere has spoken candidly about the difficulties of building Manhattan's early management team. Political maneuvering and rivalries caused trouble. At AirWatch, he valued a group whose members had already worked together. Familiarity made it easier to delegate as the business expanded.
He relayed a board member's advice: “You don't buy a dog and then bark for it.” It is a useful sentence to remember before hiring a capable executive and supplying hourly instructions. His accompanying point was that employees need guidance and room to do their jobs, including room to do them differently.
“You don't buy a dog and then bark for it.”A board member's advice, recalled by Alan Dabbiere
The practical edge of this philosophy predates the companies. Dabbiere wrestled in high school and college. He credited repeated practice and tenacity with his progress, recalling an undefeated high-school senior year. Indiana's wrestling records also list Alan J. Dabbiere among its former letter winners.
There is something pleasing about the connection between a wrestling mat and a management meeting. Both can expose the limits of a clever opening move. His business advice gives persistence an operational purpose: learn the customer, choose a workable approach, recruit people who can execute it, and let their responsibilities grow.
A third chapter, and an exit
OneTrust brought Dabbiere into privacy management as co-chairman, alongside familiar colleagues. Founder and CEO Kabir Barday had worked at AirWatch. In 2021, when OneTrust marked its fifth anniversary, Dabbiere emphasized its work helping customers build trust, transparency and ethical practices.
The continuity had limits. On March 15, 2023, OneTrust announced that Alan Dabbiere, David Dabbiere and John Marshall would leave the board and sell most of their interests to existing investors. The announcement also said Dabbiere and Barday would dismiss litigation between them. That is part of the career, alongside the celebrations.
Company building produces relationships that can last across decades, and disagreements that require a formal ending. Dabbiere expressed confidence in OneTrust's future as he departed. His public record includes both the enthusiasm of an early backer and the terms of stepping away.
The classroom keeps a place in the story
In 1998, Dabbiere endowed a supply-chain management chair at Georgia Tech. He later received honorary alumni status there, despite having earned his degrees at Indiana. Georgia's technology community recognized him with a Hall of Fame induction in 2015.
Education continues into the more recent record. Indiana University lists him as a 2026 Presidents Circle Laurel Pin benefactor and describes his support for student success. The connection stretches from his own studies to institutions preparing people who may eventually work in businesses of their own.
The airport interview is a good image to keep at the end. A founder brought a student into the day's work, fielded an uncomfortable question and made a hire. An enterprise software career can look abstract from a distance. Up close, it contains customers, colleagues, a departure gate and a candidate willing to ask why the whole thing should work.