Morphing a Consulting Business to a Cloud Computing Product Company: Bill Loumpouridis, CEO of EDL (Part 2)

Sramana: Where did you apply the object-oriented paradigm? Did you go to IT organizations in Chicago-area enterprises? How did you generate business?

Bill Loumpouridis: As specialized consultants we tried to align ourselves with some larger companies that were going to market and needed our skill set. Larger companies would then pull us into more deals.

Sramana: Were you operating as a value-added integrator?

Bill Loumpouridis: The focus was system integration.

Sramana: Was NeXT one of the brands you aligned yourself with?

Bill Loumpouridis: We never had a formal relationship with NeXT. We worked with some financial services firms in the Chicago area that were deploying NeXT computers.

Sramana: How long did the consulting company era last for you?

Bill Loumpouridis: I was there for about five years. I was there through the mid-1990s. I founded the company and moved on.

Sramana: Why did you move on?

Bill Loumpouridis: Because of another powerful lesson I learned. Choose your partners wisely. I learned the importance of chemistry at the founder level. We had some disagreements about the future direction of the company. I felt it was best if I moved on to pursue my own vision.

Sramana: What was your next move?

Bill Loumpouridis: I took advantage of the dot-com era to work with some startups. There were a lot of stock options flying around, and I took a look at a couple of those. By the time things busted in 2001 I came to some hard conclusions. The lessons learned from the dot-com bust around the unsustainability of the business models that were tossed around needed to be applied. That is where EDL came into play. The acronym stands for Excellence in Delivery Leadership. It was a response to the greed and the excess that largely drove a lot of behaviors in the dot-com run-up.

After watching a lot of companies mismanage their products, I saw that a back-to-basics movement was needed. We founded EDL with a strong focus on the fundamentals of consulting such as process methodology and the behaviors that drive sustainable growth. We focused on integrity and honesty.

Sramana: What was the value proposition of EDL?

Bill Loumpouridis: Coming out of the dot-com bust, we felt the value would be in e-commerce. There was a lot of hype, energy, and attention on B2C. There were some failed initiatives with Ariba and Commerce One, which attempted to disrupt the B2B paradigm. We realized that the notion of disintermediation, which was part of the hype of the Internet, was fundamentally unsound. If you look at how a high-tech manufacturer goes to market, their distribution channel provides a valuable function. The idea of selling direct through the Internet and skip the channel was misguided.

We connected with a company called Conmergence. They were a B2B e-commerce platform that was considered best of breed largely because of their ability to handle complex pricing. B2B has very different pricing issues because every company has different prices. There are a lot of B’s in the B2B. We hooked up with them at the right time as they were a brand that had velocity and greater recognition. We were able to become their go-to implementation partner for large enterprise B2B e-commerce installations. We are talking about Pitney Bowes, Best Buy for Business, Intel, and Hitachi. At the time we had about 20 people.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Morphing a Consulting Business to a Cloud Computing Product Company: Bill Loumpouridis, CEO of EDL
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