Morphing a Consulting Business to a Cloud Computing Product Company: Bill Loumpouridis, CEO of EDL (Part 4)

Sramana: Does that mean that your Comergent business went away?

Bill Loumpouridis: It did not go away. In 2007, I saw the trend that would take us away from traditional premise-based application development and move us toward cloud development.

Sramana: How did you leverage that trend, and how did it translate into business for you?

Bill Loumpouridis: It took time to leverage it and ramp up that business. It has taken two years to get to where we are today where we do significant work in the cloud. When you see a trend emerging you need to invest, train, and build a capability. We did the exact same thing with the Force.com platform that we did with Comergent. We hired people, trained them, and put them out as staff augmentation. We then built a capability to the point that we had critical mass and we are now doing project work. A lot of our early work in the Force.com space was staff augmentation to Salesforce.

Sramana: What kinds of clients were you working with, because the Force.com model is different? Comergent was an application for B2B commerce where you could help manufacturers that sold through multilayered channels with staff augmentation and system integration which turned into the project business model. Force.com is a platform on which a lot of development has occurred. How did this trend evolve for you? What kind of projects were you brought into?

Bill Loumpouridis: A year later Sites was announced, and that allows companies to expose their Force.com work as a website. You can use Salesforce as your Web platform. We saw an opportunity to become an ISV and build that premier package for e-commerce for Force.com. That is how CloudCraze was born. We are able to cotify our very rich legacy of building out complex enterprise e-commerce deployments within Force.com.

We took CloudCraze and became the pre-eminent for e-commerce on the cloud on Force.com. That is where we find ourselves, and that is what is so powerful for us today. We saw the opportunity, seized the day, executed our strategy and became the go-to option all in the space of 18 months.

Sramana: What is the focus of this CloudCraze product? Is it also a B2B platform like Comergent?

Bill Loumpouridis: One of the trends that started to emerge in the middle part of the decade and became more prominent in the second half of the decade is the need to provide both B2B and B2C capabilities in a single platform. We call it hybrid B2B and B2C. You need the rich UI capabilities associated with B2C, but you also need to provide the B2B underpinnings as it relates to channel selling. A lot of manufacturers do both. Today there is also the expectation that the B2B experience is going to be a high quality experience. Five years ago that was not the expectation. Today, everyone shops on the Web, and expectations regarding look and feel have risen.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Morphing a Consulting Business to a Cloud Computing Product Company: Bill Loumpouridis, CEO of EDL
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