by emccann under Customer Stories

Check it out! Our first customer video has been posted to the customer section of our website.

When Memento Press was first starting out, spreadsheets and other clipboard solutions worked just fine for them. As they grew, the clipboards stopped working and they needed a better way to manage their customer and order information.

With QuickBase, now Memento employees know they are all working with the same customer data. And communication has improved between the different production, design and marketing locations.

Josh Litwin, CEO of Memento Press is happy to report that tools like QuickBase have helped him increase sales 500% without having to increase headcount. Now that’s impressive!

Watch the Memento Press video on the QuickBase website or link through to this YouTube video to learn more about the services Memento Press provides.

I love when our customers can quantify their success with QuickBase! How much time or money have you saved by using QuickBase?

by Peter Fearey under Industry Trends, Inside QuickBase

I recently presented the QuickBase business to 50+ marketing leaders at Intuit. During the presentation I made the statement that, “there’s a new market forming and QuickBase has the lead”.

I backed up the statement that “the market is forming” by saying that:
1) in the last year there have been many startups launching in our space, and
2) some established “packaged application” SaaS players have recently been trying to generalize their brands (e.g. salesforce.com and what they are doing with force.com)

I backed up the statement that “we’ve got the lead” by saying that:
1) Independent sources like compete.com show the startups not growing quickly, and
2) If you think about the packaged players with traction in their respective markets, I haven’t seen much public evidence of success with the more generalized offerings.

Compare that to QuickBase where we have over 200K purchased seats using 10’s of thousands of business applications…AND NO TWO APPLICATIONS ARE THE SAME! Because we’ve been focused on ease of use and customization for the last 5 years we’ve seen that every customer’s unique needs are being met by their owner personalization.

After I said that, someone asked me a simple question that, I must admit, I didn’t expect. He asked, “what’s the name of the new market”? I answered by referencing these “markets”…

1) “PaaS” (Platform as a Service). More and more bloggers are starting to place us and others like us in this category. For example, checkout Phil Wainewright’s great roundup of the PaaS space or what Duncan Riley wrote recently about PaaS.

2) Enterprise 2.0. Bill Ives from the Fast Forward Blog suggests we are an Enterprise 2.0 play.

3) Online Database. Many have described QuickBase as an online database. Most notably, checkout what Sean Aune wrote on Mashable.

I think the attributes of the new market are:
1) Targets business users and makes creating and customizing business applications simple,
2) Helps teams track and manage their business processes and workflow, and
3) Is offered through a SaaS model.

When flying home it occurred to me that I should see what others think. So…what market do you think we’re in- one of these or something completely new?

Peter

by Alex Chriss under Inside QuickBase

We recently announced the launch of the Intuit QuickBase Business Consultant Program.  The program is a new effort for QuickBase to target partners who are interested in building a business to deliver customized (right-for-me) applications to their customers.  I think what we’re launching is a pretty compelling opportunity for Solution Providers to build strong businesses.  In doing some of the press interviews, I tried to focus the  message down to three key elements:

1)      The Traditional VAR channel is being disrupted by SaaS.  The low cost and speed of implementation severely cuts into traditional VAR margins.  Oh, and Saas is here to stay – it’s real!

2)      Inflexible SaaS solutions don’t offer a great model for VAR’s or Solution Providers.  If the product is fixed and implementation is simple, where does that leave a VAR?  With the relatively low cost of the ASP, a pure reseller has to do a ton of volume to be successful.

3)      QuickBase is a great solution for VAR’s and Business Experts.  Why?  First, because QuickBase is completely customizable.  Solution Providers can leverage their domain expertise, consult with their customers, and deliver a perfect solution for each customer.  Secondly, using SaaS as the platform, they can do it faster and with significantly less upfront costs than traditional software.  And lastly,  while QuickBase is certainly powerful enough to integrate with an Enterprise’s backend systems, it’s also simple enough for non-engineers to build powerful applications.  This lets a consulting company load up on business experts (where the real value is to the customer) and still deliver the perfect app.

I’ll tell some of the success stories from our current Business Consultants in future posts, but I think the program is summed up well with Cullen Coates (Crystal Bay Solutions) quote from the press release.                

“Today, I can deliver a custom-built QuickBase application in a quarter of the time, at half the cost and twice the margin.”

As Jeff Kaplan from ThinkStrategie said in his Top Ten Reasons why On-Demand Services will Soar in 2008, “VARs have been afraid that SaaS would ‘dis-intermediate’ them by eliminating their consulting and custom application development business…(but)… Channel companies are also discovering that there are still consulting and customization opportunities in the SaaS market.”  QuickBase is that opportunity!