Morphing a Consulting Business to a Cloud Computing Product Company: Bill Loumpouridis, CEO of EDL (Part 5)

Sramana: Clearly you have enormous domain knowledge in the e-commerce space collected over a decade. Now you are bringing that knowledge to a new cloud delivery model.

Bill Loumpouridis: Salesforce’s objective is to be an enterprise platform. We fulfill a big part of that requirement. By demonstrating our capability, we become the poster child for how Force.com can be a game-changing platform for your business. SalesForce is no longer just CRM, because all of that CRM data can be taken to the next level as an e-commerce play.

Sramana: How did the business development happen? How were you able to leverage Salesforce.com to gain new customers?

Bill Loumpouridis: What we had built was significant to Salesforce. As a result, they are pointing a lot of customers to us when the subject of Force.com or e-commerce comes up. We are one of their top tier go-to partners. Any time someone takes an e-commerce approach to Force.com, the executives at Salesforce will tell them that they need to talk to EDL first. There is a tremendous amount of flow coming from Salesforce explicitly. We are also listed on the AppExchange. If you type in e-commerce on the AppExchange, you will see we are one of the top results. We get a lot of lead flow from the AppExchange as well.

Sramana: How has that translated into customers? What type of revenue ramp have you seen?

Bill Loumpouridis: Right now in terms of a run rate, it is about a third of our services mix business.

Sramana: In this model, are you using your CloudCraze product as well as offering all of your integration services on top of this platform to your customers?

Bill Loumpouridis: Yes. We are still doing some legacy Java work. We are still doing work with Sterling Commerce, and they have their own value proposition, which is the right mix for some clients.

Sramana: Are you using the Sterling Commerce service business to fund the CloudCraze product business?

Bill Loumpouridis: You could say that, although we are doing a lot of Force.com. Our consulting work is funding the products.

Sramana: Earlier you articulated the desire to go from staff augmentation to project-based consulting models. Is your vision now to move away from the consulting model to a product model? Your current business is one-third product, two-thirds service. Are you looking to change that mix?

Bill Loumpouridis: We see tremendous potential for the CloudCraze product. Right now, we are taking it week by week. We are measuring the interest in this product. Product companies tend to have higher valuations than services organizations. There is a lot of appeal behind having a repeatable revenue stream that is associated with subscriptions versus one that is based on time and material. How the proportions work out will be hard to say, but there is no question that we have a goal to increase our product revenue. I don’t know where it will land.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Morphing a Consulting Business to a Cloud Computing Product Company: Bill Loumpouridis, CEO of EDL
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