WebClerk Software

Talking to software developers is akin to talking with born again Christians. To say they are evangelistic is an understatement. Bill James of James Integrated Technologies is no exception. James a West Point graduate, engineer, nuclear physicist and entrepreneur is nothing if not enthusiastic about his WebClerk product.

Designed as a way for small businesses to do eCommerce on line WebClerk has evolved to more than that. Actually there are two parts to the WebClerk suite;WebClerk and the Customer. The Customer is in effect a program that applies the integration concepts used in popular contact management programs like Goldmine and MS Outlook and uses them to manage an entire business. WebClerk is web site/web server software that carries that integration online. The suite appears to be primarily pointed at the business-to-business eCommerce rather than retail.

The integration of business activities in the Customer is the core of the software. WebClerk is a very efficient way of including online commerce into the fold. If you set your business up using the Customer, and it has features that will make every part of your organization more efficient, WebClerk can take many of the headaches out of managing two separate methods of doing business. If anything the entire package looks to complete. I thnk it would be difficult for businesses with a multi-application legacy to convert to the Customer (although it does have powerful import features). It would be very easy to build a business from scratch on the Customer though. In fact for business just catching up to the PC revolution (don't laugh there's more of them around than you think. Particularly in the small to mid-range category.) it could be ideal. Everything from initial lead contact to order fulfillment is done in the same environment, using familiar forms and processes. From there to dealing online with customers is a small step because WebClerk feeds the same data into the same format. The suite is comprehensive enough to be almost repressive and certainly reflects the nine years efforts that have gone into it's creation.

James himself is very like his product. Quick speaking his thoughts bounce from one idea, concept or explanation to another in a free form yet totally integrated way. The big picture is always just a single click away from whatever detail you may be discussing. When we did our interview he had just worked all night.

iBiz: Tell me about James Technologies. Where you came from, what's your background?

James: I spent eight years in the Army after West Point. I left the military and went to work for Honeywell setting up manufacturing plants around the US and Europe. I liked the way the Japanese managed their factories and the way the Swedes put their practical gauging together. The process controls. I decided I'd leave Honeywell and create a company to do statistical process controls using gauging techniques from Sweden and Japanese management techniques. I thought we could just import the stuff we needed from Sweden. But their electronics turned out to be really out of date. That was in 1986.

We had to redesign the electronics and design software to do it. That company is Applied Statistics in Maplewood (www.applied-statistics.com). It's pretty cool technology but I brought Venture Capitalists into that and we ended up disagreeing about the nature of the Universe. They owned 2/3 and I owned 1/3 so I said, "I'll go do something else." In the 3 years we worked on that projects it did $80,000 the first year, $4000,000 the second year and $2.2 million the third. We were on a pretty good growth curve.

It was the first time I'd ever been in sales. Before that I'd been in engineering. To me it looked to me like sales was a process, but in most companies it was a black box that you prayed to and hoped something came out of it periodically. So I sat down and wrote a software program on how to manage sales. Now, that is the Customer (the client side of the WebClerk suite).

When I built it, it was all Macintosh. Over the past three years we've built it to work cross platform. We've put the web stuff into it. It already did things like online faxing directly from the program. It had letter writing capabilities, it had spreadsheet capabilities, all kinds of communication tools.

What WebClerk does. . . Really the Customer manages the sales/business process, WebClerk is the web server side of it. It puts all of the features you need to manage your relationships with your customers online.

iBiz: So that's the other thing you decided to do? Where did you see WebClerk going?

James: One of the first things it will do is eliminate fax machines. The idea is we are going to replace fax machines in business, just we replaced Telex. Replace it with better technology. For doing business transactions and working with partners, particularly repetitive transactions, web servers, locally run web servers are far more powerful than any other technology. I believe in three years it will be very rare to fax someone. It'll all be done online.

A Fax is the business of making digital information analogue to carry it over to a machine to make it digital again to send it someplace that can make it analogue again. It's absurd. The need for anything to be analogue except your signature is trivial.

iBiz: Features like?

James: For instance, if you're a customer you can just sign in from your location and check on the status of all your open orders and/or your open proposals. You could see who has responsibility for them, what needs to be done on each one. You could also check on recent shipments, then go directly to UPS' site and check on the delivery status. All this is real-time interactive. A salesperson that's in the field calling on a customer just needs to call up the customers status and find out everything about that customer. That salesperson is making a sales and service presence that's as close to the customer as the customer's own computer. WebClerk takes the whole process a whole step higher. It makes the customer an integral part of the customer support systems.

I also put forums, threaded discussion groups like CompuServe had, into the program. Now customers can talk not only to your company but they can talk to each other. That's a part of the concept of matrix communication.

You know how the mainframe industry used to be centered here? I think we missed the corner when it downsized. Those businesses like Honeywell-Bull, Cray, Unisys and Control Data almost evaporated. They tried and missed completely. Now that's a lot of smart people thinking relatively good thoughts but they were thinking of how to get better at what they did. They weren't thinking about "What's the next solution?"

I think the next shift, and it's already in process, has very little to do with speeding up the box. It has to do with connecting boxes together and decreasing the difficulties and cost to communicate. You can see it already. The current situation is that we have used the Internet/World Web to create marketing presence but not sales presence. Right now we can all see other but we can't converse. WebClerk can change that for a company.

I think we've got a very deep product. Our plan to give the product away free is intended to give some one, or many, companies a chance to get involved in the program on a significantly deep level. Once they start doing that we're going to see companies crop up to do implementation.

iBiz: How can you give away $65 million in software?

James: I've spent eight years writing it. But it's written. Our marginal costs are pretty insignificant.

iBiz: What are you doing to reach those people?

James: We're going to have seminars here. We're doing a launch in early December. Built into WebClerk is the ability to do eCommerce. I've completely packaged, containerized this thing. That's the big difference between WebClerk and any other tool I know of on the market today. WebClerk is not a development tool although it has development tools should you choose to use them. It is an implementing tool.

iBiz:What do you mean?

James: A WebClerk user just sits there and adds their data through the import mechanisms, which are quite flexible and powerful. Let me give you an example, if I had a customer who had a 5,000 or 20,000 piece catalogue and their graphics are identified by parts numbers or groups of part numbers. In a couple of hours I can have them taking orders on the Internet, with no security risk.

iBiz: With an SSL connection?

James: No. Because of the compartmented nature of WebClerk. There is no ability to access the programming language from the Internet. It's got a fixed feature set within the standard program that says you can place an order; you can request information; you can place a service request and you can respond to a forum discussion. But you can't write to anywhere in the database. You also can't send an order to search anyplace except to where things are marked to be published.

If you're familiar with Fusion, it opens up everything in your machine. Our philosophy is we open up one directory called the JIT web folder. That's the same directory as the one in which the program is running. That's the only place the web server will look for pages in. It's exactly the opposite of what the development tools are doing which is opening features. We're opening up functionality. One of the things that is a function is security. It's just fall of the log simple. The event loop is very, very short because there's only about 12 or 15 commands it can respond to. It's all server based code and the pages are all non-smart HTML. There's no risk that somebody could hack a page and send the page back up. It only reads pages out of its own directory and the pages don't exist except as templates until the data is requested. Then the pages are dynamically created. The pages really only exist in RAM.

iBiz: That's certainly the way of the web these days.

James: It's nice because instead of 20,000 pages for 20,000 products you've got 1 page for 20,000 products. Actually you can have categories of pages. Let's say for your fishing category you want a different background. Or for something that's vertically displayable you want a different view than things that are horizontal. You can do that. You just put a designator in the data record that says use page 10 for this type of item or use page 20 or 2,000 for this item. WebClerk has web site management tools built right into it.

Within the program you can pull up the web site table and it shows every page. What every page is used for and what the flow is from one task to the next. If you double click on a page it pulls that page up in your favorite editor. It pulls together all the different applications in your machine that you want to use. If you have a graphic it may pull it up in PhotoShop. If you have an editor, I use Coffee Cup on the PC and bbedit on the Mac, or FrontPage or whatever you can have your pages come up directly in that application.

iBiz: What about the product database? People have their product database on a variety of legacy systems, how do you deal with that?

James: This is where we think we're going to going to make the vast majority of our revenues. Our enterprise software, the Customer, has an incredibly rich feature set. But there are two aspects to web serving. One is we operate directly off of this (WebClerk) but we can tie into almost any legacy system because we've got EDI features built right into the program. So whether we put it out in an EDI system or we map it to their legacy system, WebClerk can deal with it.

Mapping to a legacy system is very straightforward and is something the program can do directly. Then it can either talk in TCP/IP packets or in library files it dumps into "blessed" directories inside the network. Let's say on a timed event basis, say every hour it takes any new orders that came in and dumps the off into a specifically mapped format the legacy system reads and sucks up into its own system. Concurrently it can dump off its current inventory levels so the program can pick that up and manage the inventory online.

Have you ever worked with EDI? It's enormously painful because it's built upside down. It's driving sales from the buyer's point of view. In other words you, the seller, goes the buyer's location and places a sale instead of the buyer going to the seller and buying what he wants. Because EDI is being driven by big buyers like the government and Wal-Mart, EDI is the sales process stood on its ear.

What WebClerk does is the opposite. The buyer goes to somebody's site, and places an order for what they want to buy. They (the seller) can email you back a confirming purchase order tailor made for your PO system, your legacy system, so it loads as a PO directly into your system. That's straightening out the process. It can be mapped out to whatever EDI standards you have. You can store the EDI standards in here. You've eliminated the VAN, which charges for all the transactions and you've simplified the sales process. It now the buyer goes to the seller, buys what they have to sell. What's returned is a confirmation tailored to the buyers system. If trading partners are using Customer and WebClerk it's all mapped out perfectly already. They don't have to know anything. They just operate.

iBiz: How about scalability? What is a WebClerk user becomes the next Internet superstar?

James: WebClerk is easily scalable it doesn't matter how big you get. If you need more capacity you can set up multiple WebClerk operating from a single server. Then you put a smart router ahead of it that looks at the load and balances it across the WebClerk machines. If it gets bigger than that, you gang the units up and use another server accumulating the data from the multiple servers from the multiple clients. That way you can scale it up to take a billion hits an hour. Fine that's just a matter of how many cheap PCs or Macs you have sitting there to handle it. If you have the bandwidth you could have forty machines sitting they're talking. If it gets bigger you just add another forty machines. Most solutions out there ultimately depend on big SGI machines whereas this can be done with relatively cheap, easily available PC or Macintosh machines.

iBiz: That's one of the things about the WebClerk/Customer package. The price point is very low.

James: we looked at this thing and said, "For a lot of companies this is going to replace their FAX machine so let's price it like a mid-level FAX machine." That's basically how we arrived at the $650.00 price tag. The same program we're selling for $650.00 or giving away in our promotion we've sold for $70,000 on a custom solution basis. It's a pretty big package with a very robust feature set. Our real market is the enterprise. In a few years we'll all drop this eCommerce, eBusiness crap just like we don't say eFax. It's just business. It's just that the transition is coming so fast it's picked up a nomenclature. But that will fall away because it will just be normal business. People will wonder if they really did it any other way.

iBiz: What's the profile for the ideal WebClerk customer? Small? Middle? Large?

James: Our overall target market, where we can sell and make money, is companies with four to forty people on a network. That's either a small to mid-size business or a profit center for a big business like Dow Jones. We have a couple of groups within Dow Jones and we used to run a group within Cray Research before they were bought by SGI. We've done that a fair number of times. We've operated inside profit centers. Our software is enterprise software pitched at the profit center level.

I really like small to mid-size business because the sales cycle is so reasonable. Since single users fall below WebClerk's target market we've decided to educate the market. That's why we're giving it away. IBM will charge you $20,000 for what I can give away free because my cost of goods allows that. We need expertise with our product to develop. To do that we're going to seed the market. When people look at it and say gee I can run my whole business off this they'll buy, on average, eight to ten client-server seats. They do it so their order entry people are on the same data file as their service people or their shipping clerks or their management, executives and their sales people. And, the big bonus, it it's the same data file as their customers are. They're on WebClerk and everybody else in on the Customer.

If you get PC Week you'll see the sections listed out, Internet, Intranet, eCommerce, we have a single product suite that could be covered in each of those categories.

iBiz: Integration seems to be the direction software development is headed.

James: We've had it for years now and we've polished it and polished it right down to including about 200 QuickTime movies. When you pull up the technical references in the program the help files are often movies. Another great feature of our Technical References is you can include instructions for any program your company uses, into them. Let's say you're an engineering company. You've got a format for how to lay out the title block for engineering drawings. You click on Title Block in the Technical References and it pulls up your CAD program with an example. All that is built that into the program.

When you see this work you'll be amazed this tiny (25 people) little company did this. We could do it because our lines of communication are so short. Only four of us are here the others are scattered around the country.

iBiz: When are you expecting to have these instructional seminars?

James: We'd like to start in November. Then we'll run through December and January.

iBiz: Giving away product like that where's the money? Do you expect to make money in implementation?

James: No, I expect third party companies will do that. I want to sell software. I also know, after having people using our software for nine years that some of the people who get their free single user copy will never buy anything and others will come back and buy 40 or 50 seat licenses. Then we will make significant money.

We also know if people want something other than standard solutions they will need to buy time and services and support. In the beginning someplace has to create a community where people know how to do this on a large scale. Hence the large giveaway.

iBiz: How are you going to promote these seminars?

James: Well talking to you and we're going to blast it out over the Internet. I've also been talking to the school systems. I'm going to get them geared up. I'm trying to get Arne Carlson's attention but I'm not having much luck. I've talked to the Minnesota's High Technology Association. I'm trying to find people who want "Web stuff" to be leading the way to be channel partners for us. Right now we're calling the entire community, all of the ISPs and all of the computer resellers, all of the designers.

Here's a list of benefits WebClerk can bring to each group. ISPs get to sell their services, connection services and bandwidth. Computer sellers get to sell computers because WebClerk runs on a standard box, anything over 133Mhz. Web developers can forget about having to program a CGI onto a page to get it to do a search. You just throw the database field up there. WebClerk sites come prefabricated with various looks. You can go in and change to look and not have to worry about the coding. The coding is firmware in the server application. Everybody gets to sell what they do best.

iBiz: Can a Mom and Pop operation use WebClerk?

James: Sure. You could do it with really tiny bandwidth but in reality you need a fixed IP address. You need a connection that's up all the time or at least up on a rapid basis. Like ISDN you could be down but connection time is just a couple seconds. The connection time on an analogue modem, 45 seconds, is too long. It's too long to set up a two-way communication. I equate a fixed IP address to a fixed phone number. A place where people can get a hold of you all the time.

Another advantage to having this run on a client-server basis is I could have my main database on the main server but I could have each of the clients running in a different language. One in German, one in French, one in English all operating in native languages pulling from the main data file. The programs are capable of multiple currencies. There's a need for multiple international sales outlets to be able to share resources. Medtronic or St Jude's for example, they may have servers running in multiple international locations but they all need to reference a single document that resides here. Now the libraries on each server can be integrated using this technology and they also have the ability to take orders.

I think the forums are an incredibly attractive feature. You not only have your company's efforts but you also have the benefit of your customer providing support for each other. Your site becomes the general store or the corner bar for this technical group or this industry.

WebClerk gives Mom and Pop store or Main Street merchants the technical prowess of amazon.com. If you're a small bookstore in Hudson you can have a retail outlet where customers can sip coffee and browse the shelves but for title I don't stock? They can hit my web site, order their book and have it drop shipped just like amazon.com. Web Clerk is leveling the technical playing field. We're saying go do business! Go compete!

 iBiz