EDL Consulting extends its cloud-computing business with Force.com sites

Online shopping remains a bright point in today’s uncertain economy, and many businesses are renewing their focus on it. EDL Consulting, a leading e-commerce consulting firm, helps its clients take advantage of cloud-computing technologies to get more out of their online sales efforts. Recently, EDL expanded its business by developing a new application that lets customers build scalable, cost-effective, e-commerce solutions. The application, which is available through a wholly owned subsidiary of EDL, uses Force.com sites to deliver fast, easy-to-use, e-commerce solutions—and gives EDL a new revenue source.
 

Force.com sites – an e-commerce game-changer

For more than 9 years, EDL Consulting has been helping clients manage inquiry-to-cash business processes—everything from demand-generation activities to transactions to supporting customers through post-purchase activities. One of the company’s initial areas of focus was integrating salesforce.com’s CRM solutions with standalone Java e-commerce ones.
 

With the launch of the Force.com platform, EDL found a way to eliminate its integration worries. According to Bill Loumpouridis, EDL’s president and CEO, “It sometimes took a substantial amount of energy and effort to integrate standalone e-commerce solutions with CRM. The benefit of using Force.com to develop inquiry-to-cash solutions in the cloud without the drag of servers and databases and hardware—and being able to easily extend CRM data—was really a 1+1=5 solution. We saw a big opportunity for our business with Force.com.”
 

A defining moment for EDL’s future was the announcement of Force.com sites at Dreamforce ’08. Force.com sites are Web sites that automatically include a database, back-end systems integration, workflow and approval rules, and analytics—all in the cloud. “When Marc demonstrated Force.com sites up on the stage, I literally fell off of my chair,” Loumpouridis says. “It completely changes the game. No more worrying about the scalability of SharePoint, or whether my apps are stepping on each other in .NET, or how a Web site is performing. With Force.com sites, we can do everything related to e-commerce—absolutely everything—in the same place for the first time.”
 

Entering the Force.com developer challenge

In conjunction with the sites launch, salesforce.com hosted the Force.com Sites Developer Challenge. “We found out about the contest just a week before submissions were due,” says Loumpouridis. “Obviously that wasn’t a lot of time to pull something together. But we knew that we needed to prove to ourselves that this technology was ‘real’—and that we could support a user experience as rich as Java—before we started talking to our clients about it. So we entered anyway.”
 

Loumpouridis dedicated four senior consultants and gave them an empty conference room and a week of uninterrupted time. Three were Java developers—with little or no Force.com experience—and the fourth was a designer. With CSS graphics from partner Biersma Creative, EDL quickly pulled together an eye-catching video game store using Force.com pages (Visualforce) and AJAX. “There’s no way we could have done it that quickly with another platform,” says Loumpouridis.
 

EDL’s submission, GameCraze, took the prize for best visual representation using Force.com sites. Loumpouridis quickly realized that there was an opportunity—beyond consulting—to be early to market with an e-commerce application built on Force.com. To make sure they put the proper level of focus, investment, and execution on EDL’s first “ISV” project, he created a new, wholly owned subsidiary—called CloudCraze. “We pulled four people out of billable roles at EDL and moved them into the new company. In only 9 weeks, we had a functional beta—which we also named CloudCraze—and version 1.0 production went live just a few weeks later.”
 

Cost-effective solution opens new markets

The first CloudCraze customer launched just 2 months after the beta. LI-COR Bioscience made its biotech reagents, consumables, and environmental products available via a CloudCraze e-commerce site targeting academic, commercial, and pharmaceutical research teams. “It was the classic story of a .NET storefront that wasn’t responsive and was overly expensive to maintain,” says Loumpouridis. “With CloudCraze, LI-COR was able to eliminate those problems while also extending its CRM. Best of all, deploying CloudCraze took only ⅓ the time and 1/4 the cost of a Java implementation offering the same functionality.”
 

With its ISV offering, EDL is able to serve a wider range of customers and tap new revenue streams. “In the past, a robust enterprise e-commerce Web site would cost $600,000–$1,000,000 to build end-to-end,” continues Loumpouridis. “The price point used to be prohibitive for many businesses, but Force.com is changing all that. With Force.com, we can do the same thing for $100,000–$300,000.” He reports interest from tiny startups to the Global 100.
 

Loumpouridis adds, “We modeled the CloudCraze application after the notion of a ‘functional buyer.’ If a sales operations person can maintain CRM, a marketing person should be able to maintain the Web site. We put a Flex interface on top of the Force.com administration so users can drag and drop to create promotions or change product hierarchy. Things that would normally take a lot of effort and people can now be done by marketers in minutes. That’s very attractive to a lot of companies.”
 

Salesforce.com programs enable customer choice

CloudCraze was one of the first e-commerce applications available on the AppExchange. Potential clients can view screenshots, watch a demo, and sign up for a test drive at the online marketplace. Loumpouridis reports that 20–25 percent of CloudCraze leads are generated there. Other leads are flowing in via the EDL Web site and cloud-craze.com, organic search rankings, marketing campaigns, and through networking at Dreamforce. EDL is also a charter member of the Force.com VAR (value-added reseller) program, which lets select partners sell salesforce.com licenses directly to customers—and receive a portion of those sales. According to Loumpouridis, “We’re still early in the process, but coming from a consulting background, adding another predictable, recurring revenue stream is certainly very attractive to us.”
 

He adds, “The biggest benefit of the VAR program is that it lets us give our prospects and customers more choice about how their licenses are priced and bundled. Some clients like to have a single point of contact, so we can give them the convenience of a single source. Others prefer that the platform vendor has some skin in the game. The VAR program is all about choice, and we’re glad to be able to give our customers choice. It’s all about them.”

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