Three of us traveled this week to meet with a customer who’s running a $54M business initiative on TrackVia.  That’s not the important part of this story, although I couldn’t resist mentioning the $54M part.  This customer uses TrackVia as the application by which they accept, track, and fulfill customer orders, including a whole lot of workflow during the process.  They have lots of linked tables, email alerts for workflow, and reporting built into their application.

In any event, one of the key decision makers for the customer asked if TrackVia could integrate with the “ticket tracker” that they use to dispatch maintenance people whenever a device fails in the field.  Matt McAdams, our CTO, said that yes, TrackVia can be integrated with just about any application out there (we have customers that use TrackVia as a front-end to their Oracle ERPs).  However, he said, TrackVia would be better suited to replace the ticket tracker, rather than integrate with it.  And he said that he could prove it by building a fully functional ticket tracker in less than 10 minutes that’s more powerful than any of the ticket trackers he’s used in 15 years of software development experience.  Then, he did it.  About 5 minutes into Matt’s performance, the customer leaned over and asked our sales rep if the ticket tracker that Matt was building was covered under their current subscription with us….  She was sold.

The lesson to me is that, it’s easy to think that the best ticket tracking solution is a ticket tracker.   But that’s not true if you want the flexibility to build a tailor-made solution that fits the exact way you do business.