Is your ISV primed for Takeoff?

“We literally changed the engine while still flying our aircraft, and reengineered our product architecture to facilitate SaaS deployment. We enhanced our functionality, and transitioned our solutions into a unified product suite. All of the above were made possible only because of the additional capacity, capability, and expertise provided by coMakeIT”

-Paul van Dongen, CTO and co-founder MPO

As an entrepreneur you have bootstrapped your ISV startup business, and realized the short-term goals with a Product 1.0 rollout. You were successful in transforming your business ideas into a tangible technology solution, thereby validating your primary user scenarios, and was also able to gain additional market traction by offering customized solutions tailored for diverse users. Your subsequent product releases have stabilized the initial version, and started generating enough revenues, warranting further investment for pursuing your product roadmap.

This means that your ISV is well past the startup phase, and is about to entera period of rapid growth. While your product might be ready for a takeoff, is your ISV primed, and ready for this phase ? You could be facing any or all of the following scenarios:

• You have a core group of people who have done an outstanding job developing the first few versions of the product, but operate without a streamlined process for continuous development, testing, and release.
• In an effort to please different user groups, you have developed multiple customized solutions, and as a result you have multiple development branches that have to be continuously supported, which is a nightmarish situation in terms of engineering management.
• You lack agile development processes, which are ideal for rapid, and iterative product development
• You also have severe capacity bottlenecks, and lack access to resources with the right technology skills, constraining your growth and scaling up plans.

You are aware of the potential benefits that can accrue from automation (build, integrate, test, and deploy environments), but lack the expertise and personnel to implement the processes and best practices related to automation. How do you ensure that your ISV is geared, tooled and primed for the explosive growth that you know is within your reach?

With our track record of helping ISVs grow in a distributed environment, we at coMakeIT have extensive expertise in dealing with all the issues that you are grappling with. Over the past 10 years, we have helped numerous ISVs that are exactly in the same situation as you are, evolve from struggling startups into mature businesses with sophisticated technology products and services. Our unique engagement framework offers a “Managed Team” service targeted towards ISVs which are embarking on their growth phase, with the following features:

• A dedicated team with a mix of the right technology and product engineering skills to work exclusively on your product road map
• Mentoring and team incubation with agile process and tool framework to facilitate distributed development
• Product management expertise to guide and execute your product roadmap
• Tooling, and process support to facilitate automation

Our unique “Managed Team”service offers the following benefits to ISVs pursuing rapid growth:

• Access to a dedicated team with top notch technology talent, that will help you overcome crippling shortage of skilled manpower
• A service delivery model that allows you to focus on growing your business, while we take care of your organizational growth
• Handholding and nurturing to ensure that your distributed teams scale, and produce in tandem with your native teams
• Additional development capacity to pursue your product roadmap and innovation

To illustrate the advantages of our unique, and strategic engagement framework, I would like to share the case study of MPO, an innovative ISV from Netherlands, providing SCM solutions for the logistics industry. MPO was founded in 2000, and it functioned in a startup, garage mode for the first 5 years of its existence, bootstrapped and self-financed by its founders. With the help of a small team of developers, and with their own strong technology expertise, the founders developed a SCM software package by 2005, and started marketing it to various customers in the Netherlands and EU. By 2010, they had a handful of revenue generating customers, who were being supported through individual customized solutions, and MPO realized that it was facing the following business challenges:

• Difficulty in maintaining multiple code bases of customized solutions
• Adhoc customer driven releases
• Lack of automation
• Capacity constraints to handle additional functionality

In 2010, we have set up a“Managed Team”for MPO, which resulted in:

• a dedicated development team working exclusively for MPO with zero attrition
• a reengineeredproduct suite and successful cloud based SaaS deployment
• a single, unified product suite with enhanced functionality
• common workflow processes for distributed development
• a formal release management process with automation
• 400 % increase in customer base and revenues
• 200% increase in profitability

As I have outlined above, our unique services are tailored to help ISVs grow organizationally, and we have the expertise, and track record to demonstrate our capabilities. If you are an ISV pursuing a growth path, we can help you prepare for a Takeoff.