Challenge

Craig and David Rosenbaum, Managing Partners at Rosetree Solutions, compare looking for a custom software application to the process of shopping for a home. People are looking for something to fit their unique needs. And while you can probably find a home out there that has some of your requirements, it’s often a lot easier to start from scratch—that’s why you see so many custom homes.

For the Rosenbaums, it’s the same with software. When you work with different customers every day, you quickly realize that no two situations are ever the same.

“We’re almost like a custom home builder, in the sense that way try to understand the requirements and build from the foundation up,” David says.

The challenge for Rosetree’s clients, though, is often that building an application from the ground up takes more time and resources than most organizations have to spare.

“When you’re looking at using typical enterprise solutions, you are confined to a box of what they allow,” Craig says. “And if you want to get outside of the box, it’s very costly and time sensitive.”

Rosetree needed to provide their clients with a tool to create what they imagined together, without unnecessarily driving up costs or IT backlog.

Solutions

David Rosenbaum first encountered Skuid at another company he owns called Illumination Fireworks, which does professional firework displays. The company had unique needs when it came to quoting and inventory management, and David needed a way to simplify and streamline those processes in Salesforce.

With Skuid, David and his team were able to easily consolidate inventory and quoting into a single, custom application. David and Craig quickly recognized the value of the platform, and identified how they might use it deliver more robust services to their clients at Rosetree.

Now, as a Skuid Alliance Consulting Partner, Rosetree works with clients to identify what they need in an application, and provides Skuid consulting and development services so that the company can build a solution.

“With Skuid, the discovery process goes a lot quicker. The development process goes a lot faster,” David says. “Skuid is that tool set that gives us that opportunity to develop apps with a lot more speed.”

Results

“We love partnering with Skuid because it helps our clients get the most out of their Salesforce investment,” Craig says. “Our customers are amazed, as are the consultants and developers we bring on, at how quickly we’re able to build meaningful solutions with Skuid.”

For Rosetree and Skuid’s joint customers (including CBRE, Volga-Dnepr and Sterling Fabrication), building solutions with Skuid provides value on multiple levels. From the IT point of view, apps built with Skuid are much easier to maintain and update, because companies aren’t maintaining or writing code.

“So, that generally leads to things being more timely and cost-effective, because they’re not maintaining this large technical debt,” Craig says.

From the business unit perspective, it’s okay if processes change, because the app can be updated quickly to match the new process. And users get the benefit of using a system that is constantly updated and maintained for their particular functions. Often, Rosetree finds that customers rapidly expand their use of Skuid once they see what can be done.

“We build them one app with Skuid, again the light bulbs go off and it’s like ‘Oh, there’s also this other process here. There’s another process here.’ And it’s just this huge snowball effect,” David says.