Rogue IT moves ecommerce to the cloud with Force.com sites
According to the old proverb, “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.” Fortunately for Jim Thompson, CEO of Rogue IT, he’s been able to combine his personal interests with his professional life. Rogue IT helps small and medium-sized companies create custom Force.com ecommerce applications that let them run their businesses in the cloud. The firm’s focus areas – wine and specialty foods, aviation, and travel – mirror Thompson’s own passions, for a job that makes work feel like play.
Founding a Cloud Consultancy
Thompson founded Rogue IT after spending three years at CRC Health Group, where he built and managed consumer-based Force.com applications, streamlining the patient intake process and increasing Web-generated revenue for the drug and alcohol treatment provider. Thompson was inspired to found his own company when he saw an opportunity for cloud computing solutions that would help small and medium sized businesses enhance and manage their online consumer marketing efforts. With the launch of Force.com sites he had all the tools he needed to make the vision real.
Rogue’s approach to client engagements differs from that of traditional consultants, which typically follow a waterfall approach. Thompson uses a wiki for requirement gathering, documentation, and mockups, accommodating scope creep and allowing maximum flexibility. The firm typically builds a working prototype within two weeks of kicking off a new engagement, giving clients the opportunity to further define their needs. “Many customers don’t fully know what they want until they can interact with a working model,” Thompson explains.
Rogue focuses almost exclusively on custom salesforce.com implementations, working primarily with Apex code and Force.com pages to build unique solutions for clients. “As a company we have a lot of development experience,” explains Thompson. “PHP, Ruby, .NET, Java – you name it. But now we can do almost anything with Force.com.”
Credit Card Processing in the Cloud
For Thompson to fully deliver on his vision, the firm needed to make it easier for small companies to bill their customers and collect payments. Enterprise organizations typically accomplish this via their finance departments, but smaller companies need to be able charge consumer credit cards. Rogue IT’s Chargent application takes credit card data online via Force.com, or as part of a customized CRM, and processes charges directly,and securely, with PayPal and other providers. There’s no syncing between multiple systems, and all transaction data lives in the cloud.
The Chargent application went live on the AppExchange online marketplace after 3 months of development. “Nobody else on the AppExchange was processing credit cards natively,” says Thompson. “And there’s clearly a big market for it. We speak to new leads every day.” The application was the firm’s first project generating recurring revenue.
Rogue IT also developed Searchent Web Lead Analytics, which is also available on the AppExchange. The tool enhances “Web to lead” functionality by pulling Internet marketing data from Google Analytics into salesforce.com Web leads. “Searchent adds tremendous value to the community, for a very small cost,” says Thompson. “And with Force.com it took just 2 days to build and package our first beta version.”
Bringing Together Personal and Professional Interests
A graduate of Berklee College of Music and the California School of Culinary Arts, Thompson is passionate about food and wine. It seems only fitting that his company’s first major customer was the producer of one of Napa Valley’s most sought after wine labels. Demand for the winery’s vintages is so high that consumers wait more than three years for the opportunity to purchase them.
Rogue IT helped the winery build a comprehensive new business management and sales solution based entirely on Force.com. With the new system, the winery manages inventory and allocations, maintains data on individual accounts, and processes online orders. The winery can tailor wine allocations based on purchase history, including consistency and conversion by product, seniority and influence. Rogue also rebuilt the winery’s Web presence using Force.com sites for dynamic content management and seamless order processing via Chargent.
Although the winery doesn’t release sales numbers, Thompson says, “The application easily scaled to meet the demand for orders when the latest offering became available.” He is so confident in the robustness of the utility that his firm has productized it for additional customers. Branded “GreatVines,” the application is the only cloud-computing winery management tool available today.
Speed and Peace of Mind with Force.com
Thompson is enthusiastic about the rapid turnaround times his firm experiences when working with Force.com. “Two people built the GreatVines application in just eight weeks. It was less than a third the cost of using Java or .NET, and 3-5 times faster. And if we’d used one of the other platforms, we would have had to make too many tradeoffs, sacrificing security and reliability along the way.”
“There aren’t any tool kits out there which would give me everything that comes out of the box with salesforce.com,” say Thompson. Salesforce.com publishes updates three times a year, so Rogue and its clients can continually benefit from improvements and new technologies, without needing to write any additional code.
Thompson appreciates the benefits of being part of the overall salesforce.com community, and how it helps him continue to develop cutting edge solutions. In addition to visiting Developer.force.com, Thompson is a regular attendee of the Dreamforce conference and local salesforce.com events. “I recently spoke at a CIO luncheon which resulted in a couple of great leads,” he reports.
Never a Dull Moment
Today Rogue IT’s revenues come primarily from its consulting business, but the applications are gaining in popularity and Thompson hopes to continue to grow that aspect of the business in the future. As the company continues to develop applications that can be productized, Thompson hopes to grow product revenues to more than 80% of the firm’s business.
Thompson sees continued opportunity in the cloud, especially in the small and medium sized business area which his company is targeting. “Having dealt with traditional hosting providers in the past and paying thousands of dollars each month for infrastructure, I can tell you it isn’t a challenge I want to take on again,” said Thompson. “And I don’t think my customers want to either. In today’s economy, we all have better things to focus on.”
On a personal level, Thompson is excited about plans to provide GreatVines software through partners in other wine regions, including Canada, Australia, France, Spain, Argentina, and Chile. The expansion would increase Rogue IT’s recurring revenue base (as a percentage of sales) while also bringing another of Thompson’s interests – travel – into his work life. And who said work would make you dull?
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