Knock on wood, the US economy is starting to rebound.  We at TrackVia have a kind of “grassroots” barometer of how businesses are thinking about the economy, because we answer every phone call in person and we have a lot of conversations every day with companies of all sizes.

In our conversations, we’re noticing that people are talking about building applications that capture new business opportunities.  It’s a subtle but important shift from the conversations we’ve been having since last fall, where people were asking about building applications that are cheaper alternatives to their current systems.

Our recent conversations are more fun, as business people have a lot more passion and enthusiasm for launching new business initiatives than they do for cost-cutting.  And with that passion and enthusiasm there’s inevitably a sense of urgency around getting the application built yesterday!

Often in these conversations our prospective customers are looking at a variety of ways to build an application to run their new initiative.  And obviously, price is a consideration.  One way that we help our prospective customers understand the value of a premium solution like TrackVia is to ask them: “But what if your initiative works?”

More than any other question, this helps them frame their pricing analysis.  If the business initiative works, won’t you be glad you’ve chosen a secure, scalable and reliable platform for your application rather than the cheapest?  If your initiative works really well, it’s certain to come to the attention of upper management. When it does, won’t you be relieved to tell them that it’s built on a really, really secure service like TrackVia?

When we ask the question “what if it works” and a prospective customer still thinks that our pricing is high, we encourage them to go to any of a number of other resources that are cheaper, or even free.  We even refer them to these services by name, based on the one that seems to be the best fit for their needs.  But the one thing we don’t do is drop our entry level pricing.

Our customers rely on us not only to build a great product, but also to build a great company that’s going to stay healthy and grow. The only way we can do that is by charging a fair price for the serious and secure infrastructure we provide, and for the astounding customer support we provide. That’s how we roll!

Every company has its core business and has some technology upon which it relies to run that core business.  While I’m using the term too broadly, I’ll call that kind of technology ERP.

Meanwhile, all of the company’s departments together have hundreds of business opportunities and business problems that require technology solutions.  But each of these is individually appears so “small” that it may not merit much in the way of IT budget or resources.

Traditionally, each of these opportunities or problems is solved by buying a “point solution” off-the-shelf.  But the result of buying all of these point solutions is that 1) IT loses track of all of the disparate solutions it’s purchased and that it has to maintain and upgrade, and 2) the IT budget loses all coherence as money gets thrown at lots of different vendors.

Enter TrackVia, which provides what I’ll call a DRP, or departmental resource planning, platform.

Every day, we help departments at big, medium and small companies use our platform to build technology solutions that enable them to rapidly roll out new business initiatives, or to solve new business problems.  And nearly every time we do this, we hear back within a couple of weeks that we’ve made the TrackVia champion a hero.

And sometimes, it turns out that the opportunity we’ve helped them capture, or the problem we’ve helped them solve, wasn’t so “small” after all.  Just in the last few months we’ve:

* Helped a logistics manager at a global auto manufacturer solve an “asset tracking” problem that grew and grew to involve millions of dollars of inventory.

* Helped a business analyst at a global security company build an “order fulfillment” solution that’s enabled his team to grow a new business initiative into the company’s fastest growing line of business, generating tens of millions of dollars in sales.

Skeptics in the audience may be thinking, sure, but what happens when management finds out that a department built out a business-critical application on a software-as-a-solution platform like TrackVia.  Well, we’ve got your back.  TrackVia is a secure, stable and scalable platform, and both of the customers above did significant due diligence on us.  And as we speak, they’re expanding their TrackVia usage to additional departments.

Can we help you be a hero to your team?…

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.