By Allan Maurer
BOCA RATON, FL—Chuck Schaeffer, CEO and founder of Aplicor, started the company in 2000 to sell customer relationship management and enterprise resource planning applications on a software as a service (SaaS) model. The company’s attention to an easy to use interface and advanced capabilities has proved fruitful. Aplicor is the most awarded hosted CRM software and ERP/financial accounting solution in the SaaS industry.
The company’s Web site lists 18 awards, including several repeats as CRM product of the Year, Business of the Year, the CRM Leader Award, 4-time Users Choice winner, and 3-time CRM Excellence Award, among numerous others. The awards “Definitely build awareness,” says Schaeffer. “They’re part of a PR strategy.”
Schaeffer has 21 years of experience in traditional CRM/ERP and says he decided to apply that domain knowledge to creating a hosted, SaaS version.
What makes Aplicor’s CRM and ERP applications appealing to businesses says Schaeffer, is “The ability of a customer to define and automate their business processes in the system. If the system can do things people are otherwise doing manually, it’s a big return on investment.”
Schaffer says that a customer’s ability to customize Aplicor systems for their own business processes is what really “sets us apart.” The products require no scripting or coding. A drag and drop process lets the customer design what is needed. That’s something competition judges tend to notice, Schaeffer points out.
Slice and dice business data
That’s just the opposite of many CRM systems that require the business to adapt to it, says Schaeffer. “Just putting data in the system does not give you any competitive advantage.”
The company’s products also help its clients slice and dice business intelligence on a screen, drilling down as necessary by clicking on variables to view factors behind the data, rather than just looking at columns of raw data. “That leads to what the industry calls ‘actionable intelligence,’” Schaeffer says.
Selling the applications for $89 per user a month, the company makes the hosted software affordable for a wider range of businesses, although Aplicor focuses on mid-market and enterprise level clients. The U.S. Department of Commerce is its biggest customer, but about 70 percent of its customers are outside the United States.
“It’s used by companies in 91 countries and all but one time zone—the only one with no land mass,” Schaeffer says. Other major clients include Intel, Tyco, and France Telecom.
“Our big push now is verticalizing—turning it into industry-specific editions,” says Schaeffer. We just released a government edition and a we’re about to release a professional services edition.”
Funded by its owners, Aplicor is not actively seeking venture funding, but Schaeffer says, “We’re evaluating it. We’ve gone out once before. We got two letters of intent. One had a good valuation but the terms were not right for us. The other had the right terms, but not the right valuation. We may go out to see if we can bring the two together.” The company would look for funding of between $5 million and $10 million, he says.
The 80 employee company is doing major hiring in software development, and may reach 88 employees by the end of April.
On the Web: www.aplicor.com
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