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Chris Reddick, President and CEO of Clarity Ventures, and Ron Halversen, Vice-President of Sales and Marketing at Clarity, talk about off-the-shelf capabilities to increase customer abilities. 

Part 4 of a 4-part series (Return to Part 3)

RON: And that brings us into our final section here, customer ability. You mentioned that a minute ago, you said growing and tweaking, I think was the term you used a couple of minutes ago. And that's really what the eCommerce auction platform has to do, because you don't really know what the future holds. So you have to have a platform that can literally do anything.  

A lot of times when I'm demoing our platform, I talk about it as this modular platform, like a set of Legos. And often I'll say something like, “You might need a Lego that's a two by seven, but you need it in hot pink, and I don't have it. But as long as my company can build it and we can snap that Lego on to the set, I'll just build you a custom module, right?” And that's what we do. 

what is hipaa

RON: We've got, you know, 45, 50-some-odd modules in our platform, but we'll have clients consistently come back and going, “Hey, do you have a module for RFID scanning for the warehousing to automatically do inventory?” Nope. But we'll build you that module, and we build it, [then] snap it on. And now we have that module, right?  

Dive in a little bit and talk about how the extensibility of auction software, because there's a lot of different elements here, right? 

CHRIS: This is a really key aspect for the business. And fundamentally what it boils down to is, how can you heavily optimize around getting as much, if not all, of the off-the-shelf functionality that you need to operate the business the way that your customers, your types of auctions need to run to be fully optimized. You want to seek this optimization around that, as well as all the other factors that you were unaware of or that you will need down the road. 

That can include performance and security, and you may or may not be aware of the detail around that. So fundamentally, with customizations, this is going to be key because your business is going to change, your customers’ needs will change. And the standard that they require for you and for your business to be seen as competitive, or the leading offering in the in the space that you're in and that standard will constantly change and increase. 

You really want to look for a platform and a partner who can adapt with you and provide suggestions and recommendations based on best practices within the auction website space. This is vital, and from a capability perspective, it's very challenging from an architecture of a platform standpoint to make it so that it's easy to extend and customize while still being able to benefit from ongoing updates to the types of auction software. 

But that's really what you want. This is a key aspect whenever you're doing your search for an auction platform, to look for a vendor and partner who's going to be able to make whatever changes you need to customize a workflow to enable special intermodal shipping or freight shipping estimates, or make a really detailed escrow process like we talked about earlier. The ability to go through a very detailed visual inspection of a diamond, let's say, or a piece of art, or look at detailed documentation and sign off on it, have an approval process, the list goes on.

what is hipaa

CHRIS: But fundamentally, every single business will have different customization needs. Some of our clients want to be able to massively extend the platform and turn on advanced specific mobile applications that make it easy for auctions to be created by the sellers. And they're very specific to their industry. The list really goes on. And so as you grow your business and as you're providing more value, how can the platform that you're working with enable that. What you ideally are looking for is the ability to also customize as it goes. 

This is a major downside mechanically of SaaS. SaaS has a lot of capability for off-the-shelf commoditized offering, but you can almost think of SaaS as like a Toyota or a Lexus. They're great vehicles, but they just have a certain number of variables and certain configurations that you can implement. Whenever you work with a custom car manufacturer like a Ferrari, for example, and then you cater that particular vehicle, you're going to get a much more performant vehicle, a much more highly tuned vehicle, and it's going to be completely customized. 

If you find the right software vendor, a software vendor like Clarity, we're doing these projects all the time. We're constantly upgrading our platforms, so, just like a SaaS offering, you're going to be able to take advantage of constant updates and changes that are improving things, constant recommendations from our work in the auction industry, in the online auction space. And then you'll also be able to take advantage of this customized ability that's built in. 

RON: Confusion [occurs] when they start talking about single-tenancy versus multi-tenancy. They think, “I have to have multi-tenancy, so I have to have SaaS .” And that's not really true. Its single-tenancy means that I have my own installation of the software, but when I install the software, it can be multiple tenant, right? 

So like Chase.com, they have their own software that they built, but they've got millions of people logging in. And just like you can have your own single-tenant installation of auction software, but yet have millions of sellers and millions of auctions running, and it is SaaS-based and installed in the cloud. So people get really confused about this. “Well, I have to have SaaS because it has to be multi-tenant,” but yet they can still have a single tenant installation for their SaaS-based multi-tenant auction platform. 

CHRIS: That's right. And this is fundamentally something that we recommend, if you're really looking to build a long-term solution that's catered and matches what your business needs for your clients, for your end users. This is absolutely critical, and it can be a non-starter for pretty much any client that we've worked with over the last sixteen years, if they get stuck working with a multi-tenant SaaS-based type of solution, or even a poorly supported single tenancy type of model.

This ends up putting them into a limiting position where they cannot customize and cater everything as they scale. And fundamentally that ends up costing more than the benefits of having a low-cost commoditized solution. So there is a cost-benefit analysis that you're going to want to do when you're looking at the catering and the customization that you can do with a single-tenancy type of model, one that’s getting constant updates and upgrades to it. 

RON: I agree. Well, I think that about covers it, unless there's anything else you want to tie off at the end there. I appreciate everybody joining us today in this installment. Got another one coming up soon. Really look forward to seeing you all. Thanks, Chris. Appreciate it. 

CHRIS: Thanks, Ron. I'm looking forward to the next one as well. Bye for now. 

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