Interprise Suite New Owners as of March 1
I just received a long email from IS. To quote a small portion:
"On March 1st 2010, Interprise Software Solutions Inc. was acquired by a group of private investors from the Taylor Corporation."
"Gary Harrison, the original Founder of Interprise Solutions, will be returning to daily operations as the V.P. of Product Development after working for the company as a consultant."
It goes on to list the improvements in support and feature plans for new versions.
Maybe there is a much desired resuscitation in process here. This appears to be real movement. The website has finally been updated a bit and the email promises much more for the users there. Time will tell.
The Latest From interprise Solutions
It’s been a few years since I posted here but thought I would clarify a few things. I apologize for the long post but I’ve been away a long time and feel that a detailed explanation is only fair given the number of posts made here.
As many of you long term forum reader know, I was one of the founders of Interprise Solutions and was on the forum quite a bit a few years back.
Reading through the posts, I would have to agree with many of the negative comments made about Interprise Solutions over the past two years.
In early 2008, Interprise was bought by a large multi-billion dollar company which quickly brought in its own management and turned most of the original management team into “consultants”. Within a very short period of time each release became worse and worse as the focus went from creating a great product to finding ways to increase revenue by turning the programming department into a services group that they could bill time for. In short, “why have our developers fixing bugs when we can bill out their time” became the business plan. Realizing that this was no way to run a software company, the executive management of the parent corporation elected to divest Interprise Solutions and in March 2010 Interprise Solutions changed ownership to a group of investors that includes a happy user of our product.
Since then most of the original team has been brought back and we have been 100% focused on product quality and openness. Our latest releases have been stable and our new community website features forums, blogs and other venues for ecosystem of customers, partners and employees to interact.
To respond specifically to a few of the comments made in this thread and a few of the other threads on this forum:
Stock Allocation Errors: Many of our customers had reported stock, costing and allocation going off balance from 2008 to early 2010. This was especially true for companies that were using the stock allocation related screens that are turned on by default in the UK version but hidden by default in the US version. This no longer seem to be a major issue in the latest US releases with less than 2% of our customers reporting these balances going off in the past 4 month. We have been able to bring those customers back in balance by running a “stock fixer”. In our upcoming 6.0 release we will be making some design improvements that not only eliminates the possibility of these values going off, but is also 20x faster.
Sales Tax Calculation: We calculate sales tax “per line item” using 6 decimals as that is the correct way (different items can have different tax rates). The problem is we are posting the sales tax to the general ledger per line item instead of per transaction which can create a rounding issue by up to a ½ penny per line item (general ledger items are posted in the number of decimals of the currency – i.e. 2 decimals for the usd). Because one line item could round up by a ½ penny and the next round down by a ½ penny this is not a major issue for most companies. With that said, we do recognize that this can be an issue for certain companies and in our upcoming 6.0 version we have made several improvements to our tax engine which now includes posting to the general ledger per transaction. I apologize it took so long to get this changed.
Since the change in ownership six months ago we have accomplished the following:
- Three major releases with each one adding improvements to stability and performance. In all, over 500 enhancements. A forth major release, 6.0, will be the largest release ever for us as we upgrade our program to the latest technology and implement a number of community driven improvements.
- Two entirely new modules – Shipping and Live Chat
- An entire new product – eCommerce Plus which is NO COST TO DOWNLOAD for UNLIMITED WEBSITES / UNLIMITED USERS (see more details below). We feel that this product is a game changer.
- An entirely new website which is fully community driven with forums, blogs, groups, new features suggestions, facebook like profiles (you can even login with your facebook ID), etc. Feel free to visit our community to see what our users have to say about our products.
- Increased our support department by over 300% and implemented completely new systems and processes to increase response time and resolution time.
- Seen the majority of our former partners return to selling and supporting our product line.
- Launched a community marketplace of add-on products and services. There are some incredible add on product to Interprise that help you with everything from fixed assets to a fully integrated multi-channel marketing product that goes far beyond anything else in the market (i.e - can dynamically reprice your products on multi-channel markeplaces based on competitors prices and your cost). Want to use another cart like Magento with Interprise - yep, there is even a app for that. :)
- Launched our cloud based platform that allows you to run Interprise on your Ipad, Smartphone, etc.
- Brought to market our new Interprise Merchant services. This will become an important part of our value proposition in the years ahead. eCommerce gateways are very poor for mail order /telephone order transactions and a complete waste of money for point of sale transactions due to their higher rate. By offering our own credit card processing mechanisms inside the program, we can save our customers a considerable amount of money in fee’s and gateway charges. Also, in future releases we will be offering a “credit card” vault to our PCI certified environment so that you can allow customers to save their credit card details to simplify future orders.
- Brought Ezra Weinstein into the company to head up our new POS / Mobile Technologies division. A new POS module is in development and it will be a game changer when released.
- And much more…
Back in the late 90’s I lived in China for a while where they had an old proverb that went something like… “once you get bit by the snake, you don’t trust the rope”. As poorly as Interprise has done over the past few years, I can understand the hesitancy to take another look at our products. For those that may be still interested, this week we released out our new “eCommerce Plus” product which includes our eCommerce module, ERP Back Office Modules, Shipping module and our new Live Chat module. eCommerce Plus is free to download UNLIMITED USERS / UNLIMITED websites. The only restriction is that you have to use our merchant services (we will meet or beat your current rate and we do not charge a gateway fee) and pay a 1% transaction fee on credit card transactions. In other words, we only make money when you are successful with our product and you can upgrade to our full product (with no transaction fee) at anytime. You can download eCommerce Plus today at our website. Please note that our merchant services are only available in the U.S. right now with Canada and the U.K. coming very soon.
I hope this clarifies some of the issues of Interprise in the past as we work to improve the future for our customers and partners.
