SiliconGrassland.com

I’m often asked why I’m so focused on the seemingly boring idea of software integration. The reason is simple: “because my life is already too complicated!”. I entered the business world with a very utopian view of technology – software should do all the mundane work so humans can their minds to do interesting, innovative work.

When I entered the business world, I was shocked and saddened to find that most corporate workers were a slave to their software. They spent a lot of their day pulling reports from one system, manipulating (often manually), and then inserting into some other system. On the business development side, highly effective salespeople still kept piles of business cards on their desk, had no way to manage their tasks, and did sales initiatives with a pen and a pad of paper. Their reason? Their CRM didn’t talk to anything and didn’t produce any useful information.

I saw a core reason why technology either wasn’t used or people were slaves to it: bad delivery and no consolidation. Software was crash prone and couldn’t be trusted. Servers went down, data got lost, and paper and pencil just seemed more reliable. Also, seemly useful software programs that had similar information just didn’t seem to work together. It was all fragmented, it was difficult to upgrade, and data was pigeonholed in the application it was created in. Therein lies the opportunity.

Software shouldn’t be so hard. You shouldn’t have to hire a full time IT guy to (sort of) figure this stuff out for you. It should be available inexpensively, and it should be integrated out of the box. This is the problem we’re solving at DataSync. We’re really doing 2 things:

1. Making software inexpensive and easy to access. We do this by delivering everything to our customers’ web browser as an inexpensive service. No more expensive updates that break your computer, no more “the server is down today”. The industry buzzwords for this are SaaS or cloud computing.
2. Consolidating – We’re building a great software tool that eliminates manually entering the same information into multiple software packages. This means if you put a contact in one system, it’ll synchronize to all your systems. The same goes for other types of business information. There’s a bunch of different industry buzzwords for this, but they all boil down to consolidation.

I’m excited about the day when I show up to work at DataSync and I won’t have to enter anything twice. We’ve already made major progress. The applications I use every day don’t go down anymore, and I can access my data from anywhere. But when the day comes that my information is truly consolidated, I will finally feel that software has accomplished its mission: to help us do the things we care about, not serve software.