Patronpath is growing! Thanks to some incredible work by our Sales Support staff, Sales and especially our CEO – Patronpath is on the move. When I think of Software as a Service, there’s no greater example than online ordering for the food service industry.
I started with Patronpath in August of this year. The job has been challenging. Our development teams have had to overcome some incredibly difficult tasks but continue to deliver. As well, there are challenges in changing some paradigms in the restaurant industry.
We’re launching integrations with several POS vendors simultaneously through a POS framework that was built last year. We’ve completed an Enterprise Call Center integration. This week, we’re testing a new User Interface that will be a game changer in the industry. We’re not slowing down – we’re speeding up! We’re hiring our first Account Manager.
We literally have partners working with us and are servicing clients from around the country and around the globe. To track our projects, we utilize a combination of Basecamp (yes, THAT Basecamp) and Google Apps for Small Business.
While we utilize Outlook internally for email, we’ve launched shared calendars to track our client implementations. We use Google Docs to share and collaborate on documents and spreadsheets. This has far reaching advantages than sending spreadsheets by email and trying to keep them all updated.
Google docs is a combination of a wiki and Microsoft Office all in one. You can assign people from within your domain or outside of your domain with view and collaboration levels of access. We have no less than 10 companies that have access to different documents – with an audit and history trail on each. It’s an incredible resource that I’d be willing to implement with any size company. You can even have a text chat over your spreadsheet!
Have you heard of Google Apps?
So… it was some interesting news today when NPD announced that 73% of folks didn’t even know that Google Docs existed. 94% don’t even know that there is web productivity suites out there. Some folks within the desktop industry tingled with excitement – some called it the death of the Web App.
For those of us within the Software as a Service industry, these stats put smile on our face. Perhaps even a wide grin. No one knows we’re here – yet we’re growing. We’re not just growing, we’re exploding.
Let’s look at this a different way.
Did 73% say they knew about Google Documents but didn’t use it? Nope.
Did 94% say they knew about online productivity applications but didn’t use it? Nope.
They said they never had heard of it. Oh boy!
If you don’t think this is both a rallying call for marketing and an incredible opportunity for growth… you probably work in the desktop software industry. It’s not the death, it’s the birth!
The parallels between Office Productivity software and other software as a service applications are there. No one knows that we’re in the space, either. Most restaurants and chains believe they need to build their own systems or rely on their POS vendor. I’d be willing to bet that 99% of our industry doesn’t know that we’re around.
We’re counting on it!
Agreed. I think it’s odd that people are using that survey to pronounce the death of Office 2.0. And keep in mind that the survey says nothing about how many people are using the service, or whether they should.
I suppose there’s no irony to the fact that a website called “Microsoft Watch” has a doom and gloom angle on this survey. Too funny… have they heard about Live Office?
Never heard of Patronpath and after I visited the link I still didn’t get exactly what it does.
Hey SBM,
Yea, our site is absolutely terrible! (It was done prior to me) I’ve completed a redesign of the site and it’s under development now… we have it up in a couple weeks!
Sounds very encouraging! And it means we?ll have to work even harder on Wrike.com promotion next year 🙂 Thanks for the post!