Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Pete Lagana, Founder of Excellis Interactive (Part 3)

SM: Again, give me so use cases. Give me an example or a few examples of things that you are able to do with the kind of user experience work that you do that I wouldn’t be able to do in an off-the-shelf iPad application front ending an MRP system or CRM system.

PL: Sure. If you take SAP CRM, for instance, out of the box, if you’re trying to place an order, it’s not necessarily the most straightforward way to do it. But one of the things that we do is we skin it in a certain way. We make it much more easy to use. We align it based on a process or guided procedure or chevron so that at any point in time – you’ve faced it before when you’re checking out with a credit card. You know there’s a five-step process, and you might know from a chevron or something that you’re on step three of the five-step process, and you can navigate anywhere in between that. Well, that’s the idea that we bring to CRM or the online ordering experience with SAP software.

That’s what our products do as plug-ins on top of their software. We just make it really easy for companies to add our products and our plug-ins into SAP and bolt it into their existing applications. The screens that we use are light. We use the best of LESS and TSS and Ajax. These applications, today, are not built in. We allow users to configure their screens exactly the way they want to, when they want to at one time, whereas even Siebel and Salesforce.com don’t do that today. It’s a blend of user experience and also a blend of the technology capability that’s presented today.

SM: Talk to me about what you’re able to do with touch.

PL: I wrote blog about buttons and what people think about buttons in their applications today. Well, with mobile devices, yes there’re buttons, but it’s not as much clicking on those buttons as it is about interacting with the device through touch and swipes and gestures. That’s the new user experience because this is how people think and how they react. That’s based on touch. So, let’s say you have an iPhone application. You go and you look at pictures. Well, you swipe through the pictures, you don’t double tap on the picture to enlarge it. We bring a lot of those same features into our applications.

Let’s say that there’s a product detail that comes up; you can swipe through the product details. You can also double tap on it to bring up a larger picture of it. It’s those kinds of tricks and user experience features that we put into our products natively that users really like. We talk a lot to users and get a lot of feedback on our applications. We find out what users like and what they don’t like, and we work that into our development pipeline extremely quickly. But again, users like easy, and they like fast, not only in the application but also in how their feedback is incorporated.

SM: I still haven’t got a concrete use case of something that I would like to do with touch that off-the-shelf products don’t allow me to do but that you would be able to create for me.

PL: An off-the-shelf product like, let’s say, SAP CRM mobile doesn’t have the touch features that I’m talking about. If you brought up a product detail, there’s no such thing as swiping through it, first of all. That’s a touch. There’s no such thing as double tapping to enlarge an image. And there’re no top-down gestures from a touch perspective that let you manipulate the screen. These are all part of our out-of-the-box piece of software, when you look at pictures and product detail information that aren’t available in SAP CRM out-of-the-box software. When you customize, you have all of these APIs available to you, specific to touch, that you can freely integrate into your product design.

SM: So, the big differentiator on that front is that most of the UIs that the off-the-shelf products come with don’t take into account the touch function, whereas you do, and that already gives you a level of sophistication in the applications that you’re developing as front ends to off-the-shelf products.

PL: Correct. We might not even put buttons at all in our applications. It might all just be gesture based, completely on touch. Intuitively, that’s how users think. And that’s how we build software.

SM: What portion of your business is CRM, MRP, ERP front ending?

PL: Probably half of our business is CRM driven, and half of our business is mobile.

SM: I thought your business was doing mobile to CRM. Did I get that wrong?

PL: Well, we do Web CRM as well. We traditionally come from a Web background having done CRM in SAP, and over the last three years, we’ve integrated in a lot of mobile expertise. We do a lot of native app development. It was just a natural marriage to do mobile CRM applications. It’s taking two core skill sets and combining them into one to create products.

SM: OK. Is there anything else that you want to discuss?

PL: No, thank you. You know what? Easy and fast, that’s it. That’s what people care about on the market today, whether it’s consumer based or behind the firewall in an enterprise. Easy and fast. If you can abide by that rule, people are going to use your applications, and they’re going to keep coming back for more. And it will drive revenue. That much we’ve learned.

SM: Very good. Thanks for your time. I enjoyed talking to you.

PL: You, too, Sramana. Thanks very much.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Pete Lagana, Founder of Excellis Interactive
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