Custom software development and consulting is Integrate’s core business. We do have a product out in the wild that people are paying us to use, but custom development is, and always will be what makes Integrate, Integrate.
I’ve been thinking about the software industry as a whole recently. For as long as there have been entrepreneurs, there has been money to fuel businesses that make and sell products. In software, that’s all people are interested in. To become a big name or make an impact, you have to develop the next big product. Because of this, programmers and entrepreneurs always seem to search for ways to make the huge impact. It’s considered the Holy Grail of software development: make a great product, sit back and rake in the dough. You are now successful enough to talk at events and give everyone else advice.
When Integrate set out to create Event Clipboard, I approached it from a slightly different perspective: It doesn’t have to be the next big thing, it just has to be our next big thing. 6 or 7 months later, we have paying customers and we’re happy about it. Recently, Integrate was in talks for a strategic partnership to market Event Clipboard. Ultimately we passed on the opportunity. It just wasn’t conducive to the way we approach software and manage our business (on saying no).
All of the water-cooler hubbub about this deal at Integrate got me to thinking about who we are and why I started this business 4 years ago. I had one goal in mind: provide great service and develop great custom software to help people improve the way they do business. We’ve been fortunate enough to work with some great clients (Merrill Lynch, Johnson & Johnson), but what I’m most proud of is how happy those clients are even after a year or more has passed since we installed their software.
Most recently, I received a call from one of the division heads at Merrill Lynch about the software we developed for them, Account and Account::Coaching. If you have ever gone through a merger at a big company, you know that one of the hardest things to merge (other than the personnel) are the different software systems that run the businesses. So when this director called me to talk about Account, I thought they were going to ask what the best way to decommission it is. To my surprise, Bank of America and Merrill Lynch were so happy with the system that Bank of America’s representatives have made the decision to continue to use it into the foreseeable future.
The reason I tell that story is not for accolades. I tell that story because I’m extremely proud of what we accomplished, not just in the software arena (It’s been running for 2 1/2 years without being touched by us), but because of how proud I am that Integrate got it right for this client. Low-maintenance and ease of use are certainly worth praise, but the service we had to provide to get it right is more important to me.
For Integrate, the Holy Grail is our service, which ultimately is what makes our software successful for our clients. I lament that investors and the press don’t line up to help or promote software consultancies like they do for product developers, but I’m also exceedingly happy to be in the service driven business and to have the chance to make great software for great clients.
-Chris
[...] wrote an excellent blog post about focusing on client needs. You can read it here. Though Chris’s business of custom software development differs in many ways from [...]