Delivered Innovation: Successfully Developing In The Cloud

Chicago based Delivered Innovation bills itself as “Cloud Solution Design” and just celebrated its four-year anniversary of being in business. “CTO (& company founder) Mike Topalovich started Delivered Innovation in 2006,” said Operations & Sales Director Edward Schlicksup. “He saw Salesforce.com come into being and realized it was going to be huge founded Delivered Innovation to help companies with the disruptive change it brought.” Delivered Innovation works primarily on the Force.com platform and just participated in the 2010 Dreamforce conference. When Salesforce.com launched as a CRM tool in 1999 by Marc Benioff, it was viewed as a competitor to Siebel in a David vs. Goliath matchup by CNET in an article in Feb. 2000. Since then it has gone on to dominate in the CRM space as organizations ditched cumbersome excel spreadsheets and proprietary systems for the ease of an application that lived in the cloud- no backups to make and easy reporting transformed the way sales teams worked in multiple industries. Marc Benioff followed this success up with the launch of Force.com, cloud based application development tools that allow businesses to streamline operations and significantly lower the barrier to doing business in ecommerce for mid range companies. Schlicksup says this is Delivered Innovation’s sweet spot. “Our main target customer is in the $10M – $100M range and where we like to specialize.” Schlicksup explained that in the past companies of this size had to spend significant amounts of resources to compete with larger companies in the space but thanks to the Force.com platform and companies like Delivered Innovation, they can compete for a fraction of the cost. “We have done projects for companies ranging in size from 10 person financial advisor firms to Fortune 50 companies,” he said, “but larger projects moving legacy apps to clouds or other large scale migrations tend to require a larger, more intensive budget- but developing in Force.com still saves companies large amounts of money.” Force.com grew so successful that Salesforce.com puts on an annual conference every year called “Dreamforce” where companies that develop in the space gather and Delivered Innovations attended. “Dreamforce is an event that really drives home just how impressive Force.com is and what you can do with it.” Delivered Innovation’s revenue has doubled its revenue from 2010 and they are looking to grow. Said Schlicksup, “We plan to do a much larger amount of business this year and need a good developer to join the team to help us handle the workload.”