Morphing a Consulting Business to a Cloud Computing Product Company: Bill Loumpouridis, CEO of EDL (Part 6)

Sramana: You must have dedicated a substantial amount of resources into developing CloudCraze on the Force.com platform.

Bill Loumpouridis: Yes, we have, and it remains ongoing today. We have dedicated developers and support staff. It is a significant ongoing investment.

Sramana: What was the decision process? Do you own the company 100%?

Bill Loumpouridis: I am the majority shareholder.

Sramana: Were you in position to make that strategic decision on your own, or did you have to get buy-ins from other partners and shareholders to make that type of investment?

Bill Loumpouridis: This was entirely my decision.

Sramana: I asked that question because your decision was one that changed the company culture and required taking a certain amount of risk, which services companies are often not comfortable doing.

Bill Loumpouridis: Having the advantage of hindsight has been helpful. I have seen four disruptive waves in our industry. This is now the fifth wave. This is the greatest opportunity that I have ever had the chance to capitalize on, so I am going to give it every ounce of energy and financial backing that I can without putting my consulting business at risk.

Sramana: You have reached the point in your career where you have ownership of a company that has sufficient liquidity and cash coming into the business that it can fund a product development product. That is an evolution in your personal journey.

Bill Loumpouridis: Absolutely.

Sramana: Can we discuss some of your customers who are worth mentioning?

Bill Loumpouridis: Our flagship customer for CloudCraze is LI-COR Biosciences. They went live on October 27, 2009, and have embraced the cloud and cloud-based development on the Salesforce platform. They have seen tremendous value and benefit.

CloudCraze allows you to maintain a site without programmers. When we built CloudCraze, one of the imperatives was that it had to be as easy to administer as Salesforce is. That was the secret sauce for Salesforce. A VP of sales could pick up his or her credit card and be automated in a week. That is what I wanted for CloudCraze. It needed to have no more than a couple of months of development time, and the administration needed to be done by a functional marketing person.

Sramana: So a marketing person could just upload the stock-keeping units (SKUs) and perform functional administration?

Bill Loumpouridis: Exactly. They can upload SKUs, change prices, and create coupons. They can do it in real time, on the fly, all through our user interface. LI-COR is living the cloud dream right now. Their head of marketing and his team are capable of doing things that nobody else can do with their e-commerce system in terms of breadth and depth of administration. They have seen dramatic upticks in user volume and order sizes. All of their e-commerce metrics have gone up by healthy double digits in the past 12 months.

This segment is part 6 in the series : Morphing a Consulting Business to a Cloud Computing Product Company: Bill Loumpouridis, CEO of EDL
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