A great solution is when the customer gets outstanding value, the solution does not use up lots of their resources (which these days are always thin), and we all deliver on time.

It all comes down to implementation. Do you make it easy for the customer, or is it a challenge for them to implement with you? Do they get real financial value, and how much value do they get out of it, and what is the X factor? Can we actually deliver something to them quickly, so that once they make a decision they can actually get excited and get going with it?

So first is how hard is it for them? Good solutions can sometimes take a while; great solutions implement easily – it’s not a real challenge for them to do so. We had one major bank challenge us and say, “We heard that you can actually implement systems in 30 or 60 days; we just don’t believe it.” So we sent a professional services person there who built the whole application in three hours. It wasn’t 100 percent complete and it wasn’t beautified, but our system is built so that customers can get up and running and say that this is pretty easy to do, as opposed to requiring a lot of customer engineering. We think that great solutions don’t require a lot of customer engineering. And automation is critical to build into your products so that the customer is never frustrated with dealing with you because it’s really hard.

Second, great solutions produce big dollars – a big X factor – and good solutions produce smaller dollar factors. The X factor is how many dollars they get back for every dollar they put in. For instance, we did a test with one of our customers, Palm Computing. They tested our product so that every other customer who came to their Web site – this happened to be a Web site implementation – got to see a big box in the middle of the screen that said, “Click here and we’ll help you find the right Palm Pilot.”(That’s us and our software behind it). The next customer just got to see pictures of Palm Pilots. It continued that way, so every other person all the way to thousands of users either got a chance to use our software or not use our software. And they measured how many dollars Control Group A bought and how many dollars Control Group B bought – the users who had the chance to use our software versus the ones who just saw pictures of Palm Pilots. So the people at Palm measured how many dollars they got out of the software. What they were really interested in was whether people used this software to make active decisions – were there incremental dollars purchased because people used this software? They measured about $3.7 million of incremental purchases because people used our software. When we think about the X factor, we think about it this way….that they paid us $100,000 for that particular small application and they incrementally increased their sales $3.7 million. I don’t know what their exact gross margins are from their Web site, but I imagine that they’re 50 percent or so. The direct value out of that was somewhere around $1.8 million in contribution to their bottom line. So the X factor is $1.8 million divided by $100,000 – it’s about an 18 X value. That’s really what we’re aiming for. We want to deliver high X factors to our customers. Of course, our customers want that even more.

Third, a great solution is up and running fast. We have developed a platform on top of which we have built well over 100 applications. Many of these applications are used by multiple customers with almost no custom engineering work for that customer. What that means is that we can get a customer up and running fast – which is the only winning strategy today. This saves the customer a great deal of time. It also saves on professional services costs for the customer and us. Most companies hate the old software model of six to nine months to get up and running plus some big number of dollars like $500,000 to $1 million in professional service charges. We have designed our software to avoid that. We typically deal with a very high level of people. Once they make a decision, they want to approach things extremely methodically, so that everything goes well. But they also don’t want to wait a year to get any benefit out of the engagement. We think about it together with them in a fashion that actually delivers them value – they can get up and running very quickly