By Nelson Bennett
If your company sells a range of services or products with any degree of complexity, chances are you have a sales team that spends a lot of time just calculating quotes for customers. Likewise for your billing department.
Vancouver’s Deversus Software Inc. is launching a new web-based quotation and billing system this week called Socket that it claims will do the work for you.
“It’s for companies where add-to-cart – traditional e-commerce – just doesn’t work,” said Deversus co-founder Mike Polga.
Until recently, Deversus – a small, four-person software company – specialized in developing custom web-based applications. Socket is the first off-the-shelf application the company has designed that will be widely available to any business for a monthly subscription fee ranging from $29 to $750.
Twenty-six companies have been testing a pre-release version of Socket for months. Horizon DataSys, one of the first companies to use it, has been using a beta version of the program for more than two years.
“I’ve been looking all over for a web-based app where customers and our sales teams could use the same tool to create customized price quotations for customers,” said Horizon DataSys CEO Lyle Patel.
Horizon sells PC rollback software, which restores computer systems to previous states in the event of system failures. Because the company’s customers tend to be large organizations placing large, complex orders, coming up with quotes and then billing them was time consuming.
In the past, the company’s sales staff spent a lot of time with customers via phone and email creating customized quotations, something that can now be done online, either by the customers themselves, sales staff or both.
“People were either doing it manually or building custom solutions, which is very expensive,” said Deversus co-founder Mike Walsh. “We basically built a tool that automated quoting online so their customers, or potential customers, could build their own quotes. Once they have their quote they have the option to buy online.”
Far from replacing a company’s sales staff, the automated quotation system frees those employees up to spend more time drumming up new accounts, Patel said.
“They can be on the hunt for new clients or be setting up other customers’ accounts instead of just doing rudimentary or routine work.
“Because it’s web-based, they can create the quote anywhere. So if our sales team needs to create a quotation and they’re not in the office, they can do it from any PC that has Internet access.”
Applications like Socket are part of a wider trend in which large enterprises have been switching from customized in-house e-commerce programs to licensed or subscription programs, according to a white paper by David Chiu, an e-commerce strategist with Vancouver-based Elastic Path Software.
“[T]he number of large enterprises with their own in-house ecommerce applications declined by 24% from 2005 to 2009,” Chiu wrote in “The Top 10 Ecommerce Re-platforming Mistakes.”
In the past, companies hired software developers to tailor-make applications for their business.
“To build one application, what I call a monolithic application … to do that from scratch would be prohibitively expensive,” Chiu told Business in Vancouver.
“Major online sellers, from Wal-Mart to Symantec, made the switch to licensed software during this period, while not one of the top 200 Internet retailers in North America moved from buy to build,” Chiu noted in his white paper.
But the custom-built approach is what Polga and Walsh built Deversus on. The 26-year-old entrepreneurs founded the company in 2007, fresh out of university. The mainstay of their business-to-business enterprise has been designing custom web-based software applications to solve specific problems for clients.
But Walsh concedes that developing software as a service applications and charging licensing or subscription fees may be a more secure approach, because it can be easier to land 1,000 customers paying $100 each than to land one paying $100,000 for a custom program.
“For the foreseeable future we’re going to continue to do both,” Walsh said. “I think the longer-term vision of our company is to go down the route we’re going with Socket, simply because the market for $100,000 custom systems isn’t that big and it’s high risk.”