Web Access

BACKGROUND

Could you briefly describe your company?

We’re a creative agency. We do branding, website design and software development for a variety of clients including corporate, nonprofit, and government organizations.

What is your position?

I’m one of the founders and the creative director.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

Could you describe the business challenges you were attempting to address when you initiated the relationship with Web Access?

Web Access has helped us do software development on a variety of projects including Drupal and CiviCRM development for a bunch of different clients.

SOLUTION

Could you describe the scope of these projects? For example, did it involve custom visual design, backend development, training, or support?

They did everything from working with databases and managing servers to actual running modules and configuring software from the ground up. I'd say 70 percent of their work is custom development, including testing. 

How did you select Web Access as your solution partner?

We encountered them through an open source project that we’re involved in. We've been collaborators in other contexts and we were impressed with their technical knowledge. It made sense to get them involved with our own projects, too. 

Could you provide a sense of the size of this initiative in monetary terms?

In dollar terms, they’ve been all around the map. Anywhere from a few, to several and then tens of thousands of dollars depending on the given project.

When was the most recent project completed?

I wouldn't necessarily claim any of them really have definitive ends. We have them on a monthly retainer for support and we're still collaborating on several projects. 

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

In terms of results, could you share any statistics, metrics, or user feedback that would demonstrate the effectiveness of the work they've delivered?

Their work is mostly behind the scenes, so I don’t know if we have specific sort of feedback that could be directly attributed to their work. They’ve been very proactive and helpful, and they get up to speed on complicated projects quite quickly. 

When working with Web Access, is there anything you would consider unique or special about them compared to other vendors with which you’ve worked?

Their flexibility has been refreshing. We like being able to pull on different resources there depending on the project. It’s been useful to us to have the flexibility of getting different resources in place for different needs. And their project management style has been very effective, too. 

In retrospect, are there areas that you think they could improve upon, or are there things you'd do differently as the client before approaching this type of project?

Most of it is just learning where their skills are, and we’ve learned it. We’re probably better doing more of VM [virtual machine] original requirements writing, but they never advertised themselves as experts in that. They're a group of talented developers. They can produce some seriously high-quality applications that run smoothly and fulfill all of the functional requirements. We've been impressed to say the least. 

BACKGROUND

Could you briefly describe your company?

Civicrm.org is an organization that produces a platform for nonprofits, a CRM platform. We call it constituent relationship management. The platform is built on a LAMP stack and designed to run natively integrated with Drupal and two other open source CMSs. It’s an open source platform, and we have approximately 8,000 installs around the world. It’s licensed under a GPL license, and the project’s been in development for the past 8 1/2 years.

What is your position?

I’m a co-founder and project manager.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

Could you describe the business challenge(s) you were attempting to address when you initiated the relationship with Web Access?

We have pretty ambitious goals in terms of the application’s functionality and also the integration with Drupal and making sure that it leverages Drupal in an optimal way. We needed engineering resources to help us with the project in a cost effective way. So, we turned to Web Access, and they’ve been helping us with it for the last eight years.

SOLUTION

Could you describe the scope of the project? For example, did it involve custom design, backend development, training, support, etc.?

The team at Web Access has been the core of our engineering team pretty much since the start of the project. So, scope has ranged from some architectural work to many thousands of lines of code, help developing QA/QC processes, unit testing, integration testing, basically top to bottom.

How did you select Web Access as your solution partner?

I think that there was a micro founder, Donald Lobo, who had some relationships with them based on his produced work. That’s the main reason that we made the initial investigation.

Could you provide a sense of the size of this initiative in monetary terms?

We've probably contracted with Web Access for about $200,000 a year, on average, for the last eight years.

When was the project completed?

Our work with them is ongoing. We are in a constant state of development in terms of point releases and major releases. Folks from the Web Access engineering team are always working with our staff on various projects.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

In terms of results, could you share any statistics or metrics that would demonstrate the effectiveness of the work they've delivered?

I think one of the things that would be an interesting reference is that our platform has been written up in independent studies. We’re in the NTEN, and they do periodic surveys of nonprofit tech offerings and software offerings particularly in the U.S. and compare our platform to a number of other much more heavily funded proprietary offerings, such as Backlog, as well as the Salesforce nonprofit offerings and a number of other ones. In general, the scope of the product in comparison to the competitors as well the customer satisfaction has gotten very good grades for the last three different surveys that they’ve done. So, I guess that one statistic.

When working with Web Access, is there anything you would consider unique or special about them compared to other vendors you've work with in the past?

One of the things that I note in comparison, particularly to other offshore vendors, is that the turnover rate at Web Access is very low. We have people working on our team that have been with us pretty much since the beginning. For us, that’s super important and really adds value. Again, in comparison to my peers who've worked with other outsourced agencies or offshore, and they have to deal with constant turnover. It can be very frustrating and expensive. 

In retrospect, are there areas that you think they could improve upon, or are there things you'd do differently as the client before initiating a project with them?

This is really not directly our experience, but there are some other innovators in our ecosystem who’ve also used Web Access and has maybe not engaged at the level of project management that needed to be done. I think it’s really important to be really clear if you’re engaging Web Access as to what level of research you’re looking for and what level of supervision you expect them to provide versus what you’re going to provide because they’re pretty flexible about that. So, if you come in with a low budget, but the assumption is that you’re going to do a fair amount of supervision on your side, that’s fine. But if you go in and make that assumption, but then don’t carry through, then the next thing is there’s a problem, if the resource on their side maybe doesn’t have the right level of direction. I think that’s sort of a contractual end process and agreement that needs to be made clear with them from the very outset. I think that’s true in a lot of other situations, too.

BACKGROUND

Could you briefly describe your company?

We are a credit information company based in India. We deal with consumer payments for loans and credit cards, collecting and maintaining records.

What is your position?

I’m the director of consumerism.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

Could you describe the business challenges you were attempting to address when you initiated the relationship with Web Access?

Most of our business is online. We actually started with a very small engagement with Web Access, which was the design for the Web pages when we started the business about four years ago. Subsequently, they helped us with an online integration for a payment gateway.

As things progressed, we then proceeded to revamp our website entirely, which they suggested. I wanted to do it in a content management system, and they suggested either Drupal or Joomla. Drupal ended up being the best fit for us. We trusted their recommendation because we didn’t know the systems on a technical level.

SOLUTION

Could you describe the scope of the project? For example, did it involve custom design, backend development, training, and ongoing support?

I think our website, since 2003, was coded on .NET, and they recommended that. We wanted the revamp the whole website. The whole CIBIL website was taken down and rebuilt in Drupal. Currently, they manage our support as well. Should we want to make any changes to the website, such as add new pages or remove pages, they’re the ones who help us with it.

How did you select Web Access as your solution partner?

I think they were introduced to the then managing director of CIBIL by another software provider to CIBIL. They hardly did much work. It wasn’t anything large in scope. They were still helping manage whatever little work we had with the website. I ended up meeting them when I joined CIBIL.

I continued to use them because my predecessor had and because there weren’t any reasons to switch vendors. Subsequently, given the quality of their work, we decided to expand the relationship. They’re good at what they do, and they do it relatively economically.

Could you provide a sense of the size of this initiative in monetary terms?

I don’t remember it off the top of my head because this was about two and a half years ago. But, just to put it in perspective, the Bespoke Enterprise system, I can’t actually disclose the actual values, but suffice it to say that they came into about 40 or 50 percent of the cost of through 10 years of what it would cost us to go to a large, established software house.

When was the project completed?

Almost two years ago. The Drupal implementation and site relaunch occurred two years ago. They’ve been managing our website since then. We also have several projects that remain ongoing.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

In terms of results, could you share any statistics or metrics that would demonstrate the effectiveness of the work they’ve delivered?

They did develop something that we call CIBIL marketplace, which is like a rules engine. We use a credit report to prescreen individual consumers for banks before they apply for a loan. There are all these credit rules, which are applied onto the report before the decision of whether the review is acceptable or not is sent forward. They developed this for us. It’s been live for about 16 or 17 months. It hasn’t gone down even once. There have been almost no problems with it.

I have no complaints, quite honestly. Even if there is any goof up, or if there’s a bug in the system, it’s fixed relatively quickly. Quickly means within a couple of hours; if it’s a small bug, usually within 15 or 20 minutes.

Do you remain confident that the Drupal CMS will continue to meet your business needs into the foreseeable future?

Yes. I see no reason to stop using the Drupal system and transition to some other solution. Again, I have no interaction with the system itself. I only delegate tasks to their team and ensure that their solutions are adequate. Our website works fine. We would like the enrollment to be faster and that sort of thing. But, all that is also dependent upon the Internet speed in India. That’s not something that Drupal can control.

When working with Web Access, is there anything you would consider unique or special about them compared to other vendors you’ve worked with?

It’s the attitude. In India, we’re in the software development hub of the world. But, the difference with them is they’re one of the hungry ones. I’m not a technology person, but they come up with cost-effective solutions for even complex problems. Those solutions tend to work in a scalable fashion. I don’t think I can find a bigger compliment to give to anybody.

They’re a bunch of honest, decent guys. Even when they provide me with a quote, I would rarely, if ever, negotiate because usually it’s a rock-bottom price. There’s no need to negotiate.