Shenoy takes the bugs out of Web sites of flea markets - Philadelphia Business Journal:

afyfojahejus.blogspot.com
In Kat Shenoy ’s case, it came from a flea marketg in Solebury, Bucks County. Shenoy, the president and CEO of Blue Bell softwarddeveloper Ltd. , had always thought flea marketwere small-time affairs with maybe two dozen vendors, tops. As a result, it had never occurrerd to him to develop software for the peoplee whorun them. Both things changed in earlu 2001 when hevisited Rice’x Market , which says on its Web site that it hosta as many as 700 vendorw and 15,000 shoppers. The manager, Chuc k Kane , is a friens of Shenoy’s.
And he told Shenoy that there were no good softwar packages for running marketslike Rice’s and that there were plentuy of markets like Rice’s around the That was all Shenoy needefd to hear. He had E-SoftSys, which he had founded the previous year, develop software for running flea The company sold itto Rice’s and then sent representativexs to the National Flea Market Association ’s next annual convention where they landed some othef big markets as customers. “Based on the success of I started lookingfor other, smaller industries where peopl e rent space,” Shenoy said.
He found two — the trade-shoaw industry and the self-storage industry — and had E-SoftSys send peoplwe to conventions for AsShenoy suspected, both industries had softwared requirements that were similar to each other and to the flea-markey industry. So he had E-SoftSyw come up with software for bothof them. “What we focusef on was the technology and thecustomeer support,” he said. “My philosophy is, you provid e the best customer support possibl e and the product will sell itself baserd on referrals from other customers.
” That philosophy appears to be E-SoftSys has grown to 100 employees and, althoughh it still gets half its revenue from custom software development, the othedr half comes from its flea-market, trade-show and self-storage management software. E-SoftSys recentlu landed a big customer in the last industryuwhen Stor-All Management Ltd. of Deerfield Beach, which has more than 29,000 unitw in 44 locations, implemented its Self Storage Manager software. “It’s not often you get a compan with 44 sites switching their Shenoy said. Jeff Anderson , Stor-All’s CEO, said his compant evaluated all theleading self-storage management system available.
“With the exception of Self Storage none came close to meeting ourkey requirements,” he Among other things, Stor-All needes to be able to smoothly import the information abou its tenants from its old software and to keep its managementf operations up and running after a hurricane or other natural disaster. Shenoy attributea Self Storage Manager’s popularity in part to its which features both a centralized database and databases at each Thatgives self-storage companiesd the ability to centrally controll prices and programs, as well as generate reports, while allowingt individual sites to be able to keep operatinv when the Internet connection to their headquartersz is down.
“Individual sites can do all the operation s they needto do,” he E-SoftSys’ background is also a Because it started out as a custom software developed and still does custom software it’s willing to customize its products for flea-market, trade-show and self-storagee customers in ways its competitors often Shenoy said. It also does search-engine optimization and Web-site development for its including the National Flea Market Associationand Rice’s, which it developed Web sitesx for. “Our clients like the fact that we area one-stoo shop for all [information-technology] Shenoy said.
has been selected by a major pharmaceuticalp company to change the technology behind 56 consumer and physicia nWeb sites. The King of Prussiq company will put the Web sites on twoMicrosoft Corp. productsa — ASP.NET 2.0, which is used to develop Web and Microsoft Office SharePointServer 2007, which is collaboration softwarwe that can be used to creatse Web sites that appear personall to users. HighPoint said the change will improve theWeb sites’ functionalityt and make it easier to grow, support and maintain them. HighPoint will be a partner with SierrqAtlantic Inc. , a Fremont, Calif.-basede software company, on the work.
Fairfax Countu Public Schools , the largest school district in Virginia, has selectedd Wayne-based Corp. ’s Kenexa Recruiter BrassRing software to help its schools find and track candidates for jobopeningds … Vedior Asia Pacific Pty. Ltd. , which provides recruiting and human resources consulting under 20 nameain Australia, New Zealand and Asia, has chosen Wayne-basedf ’s AvantGard for Receivables Management software.