Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Pete Lagana, Founder of Excellis Interactive (Part 2)

SM: What would be helpful would be to double click down on some of those and give me some use cases. How are researchers using it?

PL: Sure. Let’s say there’s a sales rep who needs to be connected with his inventory, and a particular life sciences company that makes medical devices needs to constantly replenish stock or know where its stock of medical devices is located. It could be with the sales rep; it could be in a distribution center; it could be at the hospital itself; or it could be at the metro center. But having built an iOS application that allows that rep to know at any given time, here’re all the surgeries that are happening for his clients or technicians who are using these medical devices and for that sales rep to be able to know his schedule based on these surgeries. He can go to the doctors and talk to the nurses, see which surgical procedures were performed, know what was used and then replenish that inventory all while standing in the doctor’s office and then reducing that inventory back with his ERP systems. That’s just an example of an iPad app that lets us keep track of inventory and makes it easier to create purchase orders and fulfillment and replenishment on the sales rep’s side.

SM: So, you are creating these iPad apps for CRM systems, inventory systems, MRP systems?

PL: Correct. That’s one of the things that we do. We’ll create a mobile-based application, which ties in to a backend ERP type system like an SAP and allows users to get at that data really quickly, and they don’t have to be in front of a computer to do that.

SM: What is the strategy of the ERP, MRP, CRM vendors on these projects? Wouldn’t it make sense for SAP or Oracle or Salesforce.com to provide those applications themselves? Why do you have to do it?

PL: It does make sense, and they do, in fact, do it. But the issue is that it’s a big world out there. There’re thousands and thousands of use cases that could not ever possibly be covered by an out-of-the-box solution. That’s why companies like mine exist, to find out what those gap areas are, to find out what those niche needs are. There’s a solution that caters to what a client wants, better, cheaper and faster. So, someone can go out and buy a Salesforce.com and get the mobile app that he can download on his iPhone, but let’s say that it’s not branded the way a company expects. Or let’s say the company needs to integrate in another data set or couple of screens from another application and it needs to gather all these together to create a consistent user experience. Well, an out-of-the-box application’s not going to give you that. It will get you maybe 75% of what is there, but maybe that other 25% could be a core competency or competitive advantage that a company would not realize unless it developed an application that can meet its needs in a custom way. Those are all the scenarios that partake in. We find out what these things are.

There’re all kinds of them. There are millions of apps in the app store. For every one type of game or every one type of functionality, there’re probably 20 different apps that do that same thing. It’s all about what you can do better. What’s the best user experience? What’s the easiest and fastest for users? That’s what they’re going to use. That’s why Google was so popular. It’s not like Google invented search; they just did it better than anyone else.

SM: Tell me about some of those differentiated user experience elements that you particularly sell.

PL: You look at enterprise software today, and when people go home, they use things like Facebook, eBay and Amazon. And they’re used to that shopping experience. It’s easy, quick and fast. But then when you talk about enterprise software that maybe SAP has or Siebel or Salesforce.com or something like that, sometimes, you don’t get that experience. There’s a skewed expectation between what’s happening with the enterprise software and what people use on the consumer side. A lot of it has to do with the user experience. Granted, a lot of companies have a lot of enterprise data that eBay and all these places don’t have to worry about, but you should be able to take advantage of that. You should be able to build a user interface that has one-click actions or really cool overlays or that allows you to swipe quickly with your thumb. All these little things, these little pieces of technology and use cases and features improve a user’s experience, and that’s what makes them productive and makes them use your applications more than a competitor’s. It’s all about ease of use.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Pete Lagana, Founder of Excellis Interactive
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