Morphing a Consulting Business to a Cloud Computing Product Company: Bill Loumpouridis, CEO of EDL (Part 3)

Sramana: How did you establish your relationship with Comergent?

Bill Loumpouridis: Entering business partnerships like the one we did with Comergent is crucial and difficult. Establishing that relationship came through my personal business network. When the dot-com crash happened I reached out across my network and had a lot of conversations with people across the entire industry. The importance of a network is very great. I had a couple of former employees who ended up at Comergent.

The more I looked at Comergent, the more impressed I was with the space they occupied and the elegance of their solution. I saw the potential for a significant business. I liked the fact that their solution turned the paradigm of the dot-com height on its head. Fortunately, we were in the right place at the right time. I also had a level of credibility. If this had been my first job right out of college I don’t think I would have been afforded the opportunity.

Sramana: How big was Comergent at the time you established your relationship?

Bill Loumpouridis: They were doing $25 million in revenue.

Sramana: They had already achieved some measure of success, so in getting behind them you were getting into a validated business. What was the first major account Comergent dropped you into?

Bill Loumpouridis: Pitney Bowes. We went to market as a staff augmentation firm because that was our only choice, but the goal was to be project centric. The staff augmentation was supposed to be interim to allow us to build critical mass around a problem set so we could go direct and sell projects. That is what we did over the course of five years. With Pitney Bowes we did a staff augmentation model.

Sramana: You said it took you five years of staff augmentation work before you started doing project consulting. What were the years you did staff augmentation consulting?

Bill Loumpouridis: We did that from 2002 to 2007.

Sramana: What kind of revenue level did you reach with that model?

Bill Loumpouridis: We made it to $4 million.

Sramana: What happened to Comergent during that period?

Bill Loumpouridis: In 2007 they got bought by Sterling Commerce.

Sramana: How did that impact you?

Bill Loumpouridis: In a very big way. All of our contacts within the first two years of that acquisition ended up leaving the company or moving on to other roles. That is around the time that Salesforce.com became more important to us. In late 2007, Force.com was announced. That was a very significant event for our firm because we saw the potential for that platform to be significant in our space. That is when we started shifting our resources to developing custom applications in the cloud versus development of traditional Web applications.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Morphing a Consulting Business to a Cloud Computing Product Company: Bill Loumpouridis, CEO of EDL
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