|
|
In 2001 when most dot coms were going out of business we
were just getting started. For a host of reasons, we decided
to fund ourselves and stayed clear of venture capital. The
vision from the beginning was to automate entire businesses
on the cloud which is
why we registered the name "bizautomation.com". In
2001 however this was a long term goal so we started with basic Sales Force
Automation (SFA) with evern more basic support and marketing
which we called
CRM for Outlook Web
Access "OWA" (the web version of Outlook).
The corporate mission was to piggy back onto the hundreds of
MS Exchange service providers referred to as ASPs
(Application Service Providers) which at the time was
considered the "Next big thing".
In late 2002 we launched to critical
media acclaim, but there was only one
problem... the ASP market never really materialized because
people just didn't have enough bandwidth (remember we're
talking 2002) and everyone still had this "real men host
their own software" mentality. So we adjusted, and
began selling our wares to companies hosting their own MS
Exchange servers "On-Premise", mostly SBS 2000 and SBS 2003
environments.
This experience taught us a valuable lesson - On-premise
really isn't easy to implement or maintain, which as a
software company meant that it wasn't economy of scale
friendly (unless you're Microsoft). There's a reason why
consultants love on-premise - it eats up
lots of billable hours. This only reinforced what we
suspected early on, that multi-tenant Software as a Service
"SaaS" where subscribers can share all the resources on a
server farm (Codebase, Database, Hardware, Licensing,
etc...) was the only way to bring costs way down.
By 2008, after years of development and lots of
on-premise implementations of CRM, we launched the first
version of our multi-tenant, end-to-end super-suite, encompassing
everything we believed based on our experience, our
customers would need to manage their entire organization.
BizAutomation.com the product effectively transitioned us
from an on-premise to an on-demand company. While we decided
that we would still offer our product on-premise, we
realized that unless it was a larger deployment (50 users or
more) the model just wouldn't make business sense. Since
2008 we've dramatically improved the suite, which like any
massive software project is in a constant state of
improvement. We've added lots of features, and just as
importantly, we've improved on the features we initially
built, mostly from customer feedback.
Today, we're happy to say that we're debt free, remain self funded, fiercely independent, and
continue to enjoy "BizAutomating" organizations of
all shapes and sizes.
|