I have had a secret love affair. Yes, I have - with Aplicor. They are a company that does SaaS smartly and well. They understand how SaaS works in the commercial realm, yet play strongly in the public sector with one of the largest SaaS user implementations in the federal government. They have power house feature sets in both sales and customer service applications though not much to speak of when it comes to marketing (but to their defense, no one is much to speak of beyond a few rising stars who concentrate on marketing). They are targeted at the midmarket so their typical seat count for a customer isn’t the usual SaaS 5-25 but 160. They have a solid management, with CEO Chuck Schaefer a clearly 2.0 knowledgeable guy who has a genuinely insightful blog to prove it. They get thought leadership. Another principal Pete Koltis is a longtime industry veteran who ran major practices at companies like Arthur Andersen (that would be the consulting side of AA and a PeopleSoft practice.). They have won countless awards ranging from the TMC.net Software Excellence awards (5 times) to the Computerworld Green IT company of the year in 2007. There are too many others to mention. On the technical side, they have not only delivered an amazing full service back office (accounting) and front office (CRM) product, but they’ve had, catch this, 100% server uptime for 4 years in a row. This is a seriously good company. Yet, they are not only making my list for the first time but they seem to be traveling under the radar - even with lots of press releases and awards. What gives? I don’t know exactly. Regardless, they really need to step up their public visibility and engage in more of the contemporary marketing vehicles like Twitter, Facebook, etc. - which I know they understand. But they don’t use much. They should do something to be more visible. Just don’t tell my wife. This is a company ready to explode - in a good way. Watch them very closely.
Source:blogs.zdnet.com/crm
