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Interview with New Member: Argos Software

February 1, 2013 By Rhianna Collier

SIIA recently welcomed Argos Software to the membership. I had a chance to sit down with their CEO, Lee Anne Mulvehill, to learn more about the company, their solutions, and vision for the next 18 months.

Rhianna: Welcome to SIIA! Tell us a little about Argos Software and what makes your solutions unique.

Lee Anne: From our start in 1979, Argos Software has focused on developing specialized business software for the agri-business, supply chain and logistics industries. In addition, we offer a variety of services that help our customers succeed in their planning, implementation, and on-going training activities.

Rhianna: Why is it important that each implementation be customized for the customer?

Lee Anne: Each implementation is designed around the customer’s requirements as no two businesses are alike! Our network engineers work with our customers to specify their network requirements. We want to be sure that their infrastructure will properly support the software. Then, we conduct an “implementation planning workshop” that will begin to configure the system to meet the customer’s business processes, to train the administrator on the system features of the system, to define the data conversion requirements, and to train the trainer. We work with the customer’s administrator and staff on implementing each of the functional areas. The implementation process is tailored to the customers’ requirements and staff. Our goal is our customers’ success with the right balance of on-site and web training sessions.

Rhianna: You partner with a number of top provides. How important is that partner ecosystem to your business?

Lee Anne: Our partners are critical to our success. Without their development efforts and technical support, our own products cannot grow to meet the ever-changing demands of our user partners. We are reliant on our supply side partners to ensure we can provide a modern and robust infrastructure and foundation for our suite of applications. We rely to a large extent on our user partners to provide the roadmap for our own development efforts. In today’s ‘flat world’, partner ecosystems are vital.

Rhianna: How does Argos keep their customers up-to-date on upgrades and the latest enhancements of your software?

Lee Anne: Our ABECAS Insight Subscription Service provides both on-going support by our technical team as well as updates to the software. A new version of our software is released about every 4 months and is available to all subscribers. The Version number that customers are currently working with can be seen by clicking ‘about’ on the ABECAS Insight menu. When a system is first installed and changes are required in the software during the implementation process, we generally provide our development version so that updates can be installed as needed. Our technical team works with customers all the way!

Rhianna: What do you think will be the next major advancement in supply chain management systems in the next 12-18 months?

Lee Anne: To date, SCMS has focused on operational efficiency, but with an ever increasing demand for visibility, both upstream and downstream, we will see systems to systems communication and visibility tools (and mobility) growing in importance. Summary data provided by dashboards, accessible from mobile computers will be high on the selection criteria for next year’s buyer, as will automation of exception alerts triggered for suppliers and customers.

Rhianna Collier is VP for the Software Division at SIIA.

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Filed Under: Software Tagged With: Argos Software, ISV, saas

Announcing All About the Cloud 2013’s Program Committee

January 14, 2013 By SIIA

The Software & Information Association (SIIA) is excited to announce All About the Cloud’s (AATC 2013) Program Committee. Being represented by executives of SIIA’s Software Division members, the advisory group will provide strategic advice to shape the conference theme, networking events, workshops, and content. You can view a complete list of the executives representing the Program Committee on the AATC 2013 website. The event takes place from May 7-9 in the Palace Hotel, San Francisco, California.

The Program Committee for the industry’s most comprehensive ISV conference, AATC 2013 includes executives from:

CorSource Technology – the leading provider of strategic consulting, development services and technical staffing that businesses need to succeed in the fast-moving, highly competitive world of software development and IT.

FPX - the pioneering innovator of cloud-based Configure-Price-Quote® solutions that improve sales efficiency and effectiveness. We enable salespeople to respond to customers faster by aligning sales processes with customers’ decision-making behavior.

LogiXML – offers the fastest way to create BI applications, deploy scalable dashboards and reports, and embedded analytics into existing applications – all for a fraction of the cost of other solutions. Unlike traditional Business Intelligence platforms that are complex and costly, LogiXML’s agile technology allows organizations to rapidly develop, refine, and adapt BI applications that serve any number of users on any platform, all without extensive development or professional services.

SoftServe – the global provider of proven high quality software development, testing and consulting services. SoftServe is committed to bringing the best commercial software to independent software vendors and enterprises. We combine our unmatched experience with best practices delivering SaaS/Cloud, Mobility and SDLC innovative solutions.

Corporations or individuals interested in registering, sponsoring, speaking opportunities at AATC 2013, please contact: Rhianna Collier, VP, Software Division, +1.408.884.3834, rcollier@siia.net or visit: http://siia.net/aatc/2013/.

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Filed Under: All About the Cloud, Cloud Computing, Software Tagged With: AATC 2013, cloud computing, ISV, saas

Simplifying SaaS and Multi-Tenant Application Developmnet

January 3, 2013 By SIIA

Today’s guest post was submitted by SIIA member Techcello, which helps you build multi-tenant applications 30-40% faster and 50% cheaper.

e-Book Part 1 : Simplifying SaaS & Multi-tenant Application Development

A lot has been written about SaaS as a business model for monetizing software applications. But there is another dimension to SaaS – which is the technical and architectural dimension. If we have to host a separate server instance for each customer, if we have to maintain a separate code base for each customer, it still remains an ASP model not SaaS.

So SaaS automatically implies Multi-tenancy, Configurability, Scalability and a distributed Data Architecture. And a tenant need not mean a customer. Countries, Distributors or SBUs could be virtual tenants with a hierarchical relationship with the actual customers / user groups using the application. Whether it is for an ISV, Enterprise or Government, whether it is for hosting on-premise, private cloud or public cloud, techcello understands the real challenges of engineering a Multi-tenant SaaS application in all its depth and complexity.
Like we have productized the engineering and architectural expertise in the form of a platform, Techcello is proud to share this expertise in the form of an e-book.

Click here to download a full copy of the e-book.

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Filed Under: Cloud Computing, Software Tagged With: Developer, ISV, saas, Techcello

Interview with New Member: Techcello

December 28, 2012 By Rhianna Collier

SIIA is delighted to welcome our newest member Asteor Software. I had a chance to sit down with Shankar Krishnamoorthy to learn more about their application development platform.

Rhianna: Welcome to SIIA. Tell me a little bit about Techcello and what makes your solutions unique.

Shankar: Techcello is a cloud ready, multi-tenant application development platform – used by ISVs and Enterprises to build their products and applications faster and better. We are featured as Gartner Cool Vendor and Nasscom Emerge League of 10 company. ISVs who are looking at building green-field SaaS products or migrating their existing on-premise products to SaaS look at using Techcello as the platform for building their SaaS products. And, large enterprises use our Techcello platform to build their applications such as dealership management system, benefits management systems, etc. because of our strong security engine, tenant hierarchy capabilities, business rules & workflow features, developer productivity components, etc. Invision, Secova, Duosoft, Roferez, Sutherland Global Services are some of our prestigious customers who have used Techcello extensively for building their applications.

Approach to application development on top of .NET is unique in Techcello. We have productized the complex portions of building software (architecture, plumbing, data security, etc.) into Techcello and let the developers focus on building their business specific functionalities rather than bogged down by engineering complexities. They consume the API/Webservices provided by Techcello for these complex functionalities. While developers will stay with their usual development style and approach for building the software, it will be governed by Techcello so that complexities are taken care by Techcello and also the developers are lot more productive. This saves anywhere between 90 to 150 people months of effort in application development on a typical large project. So, time to market is faster. Apart from saving cost and effort, the fact that our customers use .NET technology, which gives them the complete control and flexibility in their technical approach/decisions. We believe this provides a very unique advantage for Techcello.

Rhianna: This past year you conducted a survey on SaaS/Cloud Multi-Tenancy. Can you tell us a little about your findings?

Shankar: We asked ISVs “Where are you on the road to Cloud, SaaS and Multi-tenancy”. We mapped Cloud adoption (Current and Planned), SaaS adoption (Current and Planned), Multi-tenancy adoption (Current and Planned), Development Approaches and Platforms. The responses show that there is a positive trend across the industry towards Cloud, SaaS and Multi-tenancy in that order. Most companies understand the challenges, skills and investments required to build Configurable, Multi-tenant applications for a scalable Private or Public Cloud. They recognize that shifting to SaaS requires different kind of approaches both towards software development and operationalization. And, they prefer to stick with 3GL platforms such as.NET and J2EE for such development. This is more towards getting freedom, flexibility and talent. The results can be viewed here : http://blog.techcello.com/2012/04/cloud-saas-multi-tenancy-techcello-survey-2012/

Rhianna: What are some of the biggest challenges that companies face when engineering a Multi-tenant SaaS application?

Major challenge is the need of understanding multi-tenancy holistically. Each tenant data has to be secured at all levels – whether it is user data, business rules, workflow, extension fields, etc. Application architecture has to be built on top of data security considerations. This also leads to several non-functional requirements. People often underestimate the effort here. Overheads can be as high as 30%. For example, Multi-tenant SaaS implies a single code base for 1000s of customers. That brings in a lot of other implied needs such as the ability to customize the data models, views, rules and workflows at the end user / tenant level. The set-up as well as enforcement of “Who sees / does what” in the system, should also be dynamically managed during run time as it may vary depending on the region / vertical / customer. Many products are designed for global use and hence we need a layered hierarchy of tenants and users. Add to these, the obvious challenges of performance and scalability on the Cloud. Building all these capabilities is not rocket science. But the expertise and experience required is not easy to find; plus, it consumes good amount of time. Developers often prefer to focus on the business functionalities and rightfully so. But it is too risky to leave these critical engineering aspects to be closely coupled with business features. Even for customers who want to build the whole stack ground up, we always recommend that they create a separate framework team internally to build and maintain the engineering stack.

We have written an ebook on Simplifying multi-tenant application development and it is available for you to download from our website, www.techcello.com. We have covered all aspects of engineering a multi-tenant application development and it has received rave reviews from some of the readers/customers.

Rhianna: I saw a white paper you published on Non-Functional Requirements (NFRs). How do you define the NFRs and why is it critical to do so?

Shankar: Non-functional requirements are something which you may not define explicitly in your product specifications, but, expect that the product should have these. Performance, Security, Scalability, Configurability, etc. will generally come under NFR as these are not generally spelt out explicitly. If the NFRs of a custom .NET solution built for a specific customer consumes 10-15% of overall effort, the NFRs of multi-tenant SaaS products could take as high as 30%. If the product does not meet NFRs expected by a customer, it can lead to several issues (eg. Unsatisfactory performance of the software, unsatisfied customers, revenue loss, etc.). Thinking about them in the form of a productized framework (whether it is built in house or bought from outside), is critical for the long term TCO and maintainability. Many people have gone to the market with Multi-tenant products thinking that it is nothing more than adding tenant ID to the database tables. And they often have to re-engineer / re-build as they go along or compromise on their competitive advantage. CEOs and CTOs should take an active role in evaluating the NFR Check list. Based on the positive feedback we got for our white paper, we have now built an excel sheet that helps CEOs and CTOs think and choose what NFRs are needed now and in the future and calculate the effort and money that needs to be invested on them. Please write to info@techcello.com to get more details on this ROI calculator.

Rhianna Collier is VP for the Software Division at SIIA.

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Filed Under: Software Tagged With: ISV, paas, saas

Interview with New Member: LiquidPlanner

December 12, 2012 By Rhianna Collier

SIIA is delighted to welcome new member LiquidPlanner. I had a chance to speak with their CEO, Liz Pearce, to learn more about the company and the project management market.

Rhianna: Welcome to SIIA! Tell me a little about LiquidPlanner and what makes you unique in the Project Management market.

Liz: LiquidPlanner is unique because it is the only project management software to offer a bold new approach to scheduling. We call it “priority-based scheduling,” and it’s not only easier, but also far more accurate than traditional project management solutions based on the Gantt chart. Our robust scheduling engine actually automates much of the manual work that traditionally falls to project managers. In fact, our customers report their teams save an average of 16 hours a month from the automation benefits provided by LiquidPlanner.

Here’s how it works. In LiquidPlanner, you give tasks “best case / worst case” estimates and put them in priority order. Then LiquidPlanner automatically calculates for you an expected completion date for each task and for the project as a whole, based on who the work is assigned to and how much availability they have. Unlike other project management solutions, LiquidPlanner does not allow you to overbook a team member, so the results are based on real world availability of resources. Because projects and tasks are prioritized in rank order, you can instantly see when a change to one project impacts another – something that is impossible with most other tools.

LiquidPlanner also offers time tracking, collaboration, analytics, mobile apps, and more, all delivered through the cloud. We launched the company in 2008 and have over 1,200 customers in 50+ countries worldwide, many of whom are software, IT, and creative organizations.

Rhianna: How do you think the Project Management space has evolved in the last 3-5 years and what trends are driving that evolution?

Liz: The general proliferation of SaaS-based business tools has been transformative for the project management industry. Shared, collaborative systems are now the norm, in contrast to the time just a few years ago when the project manager alone held the keys to the castle. It’s resulting in a new “democratization of project data,” where information on workload, estimation accuracy, and tracking is now available to all members of the team. That means team members can get a barometric read on their own performance relative to others, not to mention better insight into their own contributions, areas for improvement, and roadmap of responsibility. Now, the onus is on vendors to provide solutions that are easier to use, so each team member themselves can update the project workspace without the need for a specialized project manager in the IT department. The trend of SaaS-based project management also means executives are getting unprecedented visibility into capacity and their ability to deliver products and services. I think you’ll see more and more businesses reporting internal cost savings from smarter project management tools.

Rhianna: You do a lot to ensure security and support with your solution. Can you tell us a little about the measure you take to ensure overall security and support of your solutions?

Liz: One of the great things about the SaaS model is that software providers live and die by the quality of service they offer. Naturally, we go to great lengths to ensure end-to-end security and reliability, from authenticating every user account via email to using SSL technology for server authentication and data encryption. We manage our own servers at a world-class data center here in Seattle. In addition to tight physical security measures, it’s architected to protect against hardware and software failure with redundant power and internet connections, hot failover servers, nightly off-site data backups, and 24/7/365 monitoring.

Rhianna: You recently took over the CEO position, having previously held the COO role at LiquidPlanner. What is your vision for the future of the company?

Liz: It’s an incredibly exciting time at LiquidPlanner. We’re really entering the second era of LiquidPlanner’s life as a company. The first five years were dedicated to R&D – we set out to tackle a really big, hard problem and disrupt an old and stagnant market. During this period, we essentially bootstrapped the company to profitability and established a loyal customer base around the world. Today, LiquidPlanner has more than 1,100 paying customers in 50 countries across multiple industries and the company was named one of “Washington’s Best WorkPlaces” by the Puget Sound Business Journal. The next phase for LiquidPlanner is all about driving the company’s growth and extending our platform. We see so many opportunities to help teams tackle increasingly complex projects in today’s competitive business environment, and we are investing heavily in social productivity innovation to meet this growing demand. My vision is that LiquidPlanner becomes a component of the must-have business software toolkit for businesses of all sizes, alongside industry leaders like Salesforce, Zendesk, and Box. We’re lucky to be doing business in a time when innovation, quality, and service are rewarded – on those grounds we are very solid. I’m extremely bullish on the future.

Rhianna Collier is VP for the Software Division at SIIA.

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Filed Under: Cloud Computing, Software, Uncategorized Tagged With: ISV, project management, saas

Interview with New Member: Shopping Cart Elite

November 19, 2012 By Rhianna Collier

Shopping Cart Elite is one of the newest SIIA members. I had a chance to meet with their CEO, Igor Soshkin, and ask him a few questions about the company and their marketplace.

Rhianna: Welcome to SIIA! Tell me a little about Shopping Cart Elite and what makes you unique.

Igor: We are able to provide an all in one solution that combines features from a dozen companies for a fraction of the price. Anyone who is looking for an affordable solution that combines Shopping Cart (Volusion or BigCommerce), CRM and ERP (Netsuite), Multi-Channel Marketing (Channel Advisor or GoDataFeed), Hosted Search (SLI Systems), Price Spying (PriceManager), Support Desk (Zendesk), SEO applications and Social Media applications would love Shopping Cart Elite.

You can read our full story here.

Rhianna: You had great success in the wholesale and automotive industries. Why did you decide to start with a focus on those two verticals?

Igor: When we first started in eCommerce in 2001, it was just my brother Nick Soshkin and I. Since there were no dot net open source shopping carts on the market at the time, we decided to create our own for our company. We had $20,000 to start the business. Fast track to 2005, we hit our peak gross sales of three million dollars, and we realized that we hit a dead-end. We were paying $125 per hour for data entry and data management, which is a minimum wage job. There was no way of getting inventory levels from our drop ship suppliers; there was no technology to automate the product synchronization between multiple marketplaces such as eBay and Amazon. It was frustrating that we were paying thousands of dollars for security consulting to address server issues, and audit the software for compliance. We had to hire in-house designers to update the website at $60 per hour. When we had to address random website issues, test new releases and pay for servers, our monthly expenses exceeded $40,000 in development. These unnecessary expenses were depleting our profits.

In 2006, we officially stopped growing, and we realized that for us to continue growing we would have to hire more engineers to address minimum wage tasks. We also had to develop more tools to automate parts of our business, which meant more developers on payroll. As the economy started to slow down, we had to find a new way to address our software and technology needs. Paying half a million dollars each year for a small eCommerce business was ridiculous. We sold our eCommerce company and started to focus on figuring out a permanent solution for eCommerce businesses to utilize our knowledge.

When we sold our eCommerce company, we made it our goal to take everything we’ve built thus far and create the best shopping cart on the market. We wanted to address everything that stopped us from growing beyond three million dollars per year. I am extremely passionate and deeply involved in this technology problem. Being an eCommerce expert, I knew what the eCommerce industry needed. Our technology would allow new entrepreneurs to create a real ten million dollar company of their own.

The industry needed a platform like eBay or Amazon, but for eCommerce websites. The platform would use the same template, it would just have different graphics to make it personal. This way we could uniformly enhance the technology every month, and everyone could benefit from the enhanced features without any effects on their design. Over time, the new features would outweigh a custom design, which would only remain custom to the store owner for as long as it took someone to copy the design. Customers don’t care how pretty the website is as long as it is professional, trustworthy, and functional. They only care about the price and inventory. Don’t take my word for it. Just ask any eBay or Amazon top seller how their sales are doing on a platform with 100s of other competitors who look exactly the same, sell the same item, and show up in the same search results. Look at any Fortune 500 website such as Staples, OfficeMax, or BestBuy. They all look alike. All the Fortune 500 companies use the same expensive third party plugins such as social reviews and hosted search.

There are over 500 shopping carts on the market. None of them address the problem that Shopping Cart Elite is trying to solve. If they did, all the Fortune 500 companies would be using them instead of paying millions for custom software development and third party plugins. Shopping Cart Elite is a solid platform for serious eCommerce businesses. We will change the game and put all other failed shopping carts out of business.

Rhianna: You have a marketplace module that allows companies to push their products in various marketplaces. Tell me about this and how you also integrate SEO content.

Igor: Companies can use Shopping Cart Elite as a central data portal. Shopping Cart Elite will then take the product data and synchronize over 30 different marketplace including eBay, Amazon, Google Shopping and every other one you can find. Customers can pick and choose what to submit, and what marketplace. They can choose only to submit certain products with inventory, or the complete store. We also synchronize their inventory to these channels, and we will soon support price and order synchronization.

As for SEO, we are the only Shopping Cart in the industry to focus on native SEO application built right into Shopping Cart Elite. Since the SEO applications are natively built, our customers can benefit use their existing product data to automate their SEO campaigns. For example, a customer can create hundreds of blogs focusing on different niches within their vertical, and have our blog poster syndicate those blogs with content from their store. You can create articles and use our LSI keyword research and SEO content optimizer to exceed the best SEO practices.

Another SEO feature that we have is called Visitor Generated SEO. You have visitors coming to your website, and searching for products using different variations of rich and long tail keywords. Wouldn’t it be awesome if when they typed something, the relevant search results would be turned into an SEO indexable page for Google? It would be even better if that webpage automatically added itself to the sitemap and ping Google to cache it immediately.

This awesome feature happens to be available on Shopping Cart Elite, and it is called Visitor Generated SEO. It does everything I just described and more. You can also get groups of keywords from Google Adwords Keyword Generator and plug them in by the thousands into your website. This will automatically create

unique content pages for all the popular keywords that Google recommends for your ranking and visitors will start pouring into your website in no time. Shopping Cart Elite is the only platform in the industry to focus on Organic SEO applications. We believe organic should be the core traffic source of any eCommerce business, and our customers agree.

For further details about our SEO, check out the information on our website here.

Rhianna: You have partnered and integrated many third party solutions to your offerings. How important are these partners and will you continue to integrate more third party solutions as appropriate?

Igor: We do partner with many companies, but we do it a little differently from other shopping carts by choosing our partners carefully. We want to deliver a great experience to our customers while making sure the customers pay an affordable price for the complete bundle.

The companies that have a partnership with us benefit from a very close relationship. We usually make sure that we natively integrate their solution in order to achieve a rich user interface and experience for our customers. We opt-in all of our current and new clients on launch day for our partners. We also make sure that all of our new clients are made well aware of our partner solutions. We partially marry our partners, and they become a part of our infrastructure.

We welcome companies to partner with us, but they need to make sure they bring real value to the table.

Rhianna: What are some of the main areas of focus for Shopping Cart Elite in the coming 12-18 months?

Igor: We finally completed our mobile strategy, and we enhanced our customer templates to automatically render the website based on the visitor’s device. The website will automatically reposition and resize elements to fit any screen including desktop, tablet or mobile.

We are also working on a new feature called Traffic Quality Analyzer which will deduct click fraud, bot traffic, visitor who engage (You can read more here about click fraud). We are very active with product development, so it is hard to predict what exactly we will be developing in 12-18 months. This year we exceeded our development roadmap by releasing over 3000 new features, and we plan to exceed that milestone again in 2013.

We are committed to making an affordable all in one ecommerce solution for companies of all sizes.

Rhianna Collier is VP for the Software Division at SIIA.

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Filed Under: Software Tagged With: eCommerce, saas, ShoppingCartElite

Interview with New Member: Argos Software

Announcing All About the Cloud 2013’s Program Committee

Simplifying SaaS and Multi-Tenant Application Developmnet

Interview with New Member: Techcello

Calling all Young and Innovative Tech Companies

Interview with New Member: LiquidPlanner

Interview with New Member: Shopping Cart Elite

About SIIA