Planvisage Company Profile and Founder Interview

Posted by Tom Blue on June 3, 2009 under Uncategorized | Be the First to Comment

Pari Annamalai is an American that is now living in Singapore. His company, Planvisage, provides supply chain solutions… Here is our interview below.

1. What do you do?

Planvisage is a Supply Chain Solutions Company. We provide both software and services to companies including outsourced planning services for small and medium sized (SMEs) businesses all over the world.

2. Who are your competitors?

Not to sound funny but our biggest competitors are Microsoft Excel or manual processes. We compete with other companies that do Production Planning, Production Scheduling, Demand Planning and Replenishment Planning for SMEs. This market is highly fragmented with no real global player. There are big players like SAP with APO, Oracle with APS, i2 and JDA Manugistics but they focus on larger manufacturing companies so we really do not consider them our competition.

3. What makes you different than your competitors?

Our product is very graphical things like our BOM Diagram and our Gnatt Based Planning board are all very unique to our solution. We also offer functionality that is important to SMEs that are only found in the larger systems but the cost of these systems can be many times higher. Our total cost of ownership is very low because of the following reasons:
a. Our products are based on a proprietary heuristic algorithm rather than optimization algorithms which increases the need for hardware.
b. The products are build on standard proven MS .net framework and standard databases like SQL, DB2 and Oracle. This insures availability of long term support and reduced costs.
c. Implementation times are 25% of the time of larger systems which insures up front investments are low. Typically we can implement our modules in less than one month.
d. No special administrators or support staff required to maintain the system. The users are able to maintain the system and make the needed changes as required.

4. What are your or your ceo’s biggest challenges?

Our biggest challenge is the overall economy has affected most of our customers worldwide but the companies that have used this time to invest in such solutions have seen paybacks of as little as one quarter on their investment. They have seen tremendous cash savings from inventory reductions, utilization of capacity more efficiently, better alignment of supply and demand which has meant lower obsolescence and inventory carrying costs and overall reduction in planning and production cycle times. In one of customers they saw a payback at one of their four factories of less than six weeks. Planvisage has also received in the past year four awards from customers and independent institutions. So getting the word out that this is truly an investment has been one of our biggest challenges.

5. How long have you been in business?

We have been in business since Jan 2004.

6. How many employees do you have?

We have about 21 employees and three partners. Our employees are equally disbursed in development and consulting. We also have a half dozen distribution partners throughout the world. We are also Microsoft, IBM and Intel ISV partners.

7. What are your revenue estimates for 2009?

We expect this year to be similar revenues to last year which is about $1,000,000.

8. Are you profitable?

We expect in 2009 to be breakeven but we have been profitable from 2004 to 2007 and have substantial cash reserves from these years. These cash reserves are in excess of one years working capital requirements.

Lead411: 40% Growth in 2009

Posted by Tom Blue on May 19, 2009 under Uncategorized | Be the First to Comment

As some of you know, I am the founder of Lead411.  Because we rarely do press releases I wanted to do a blog post on our growth so far this year.  I also figured that most people would like to know about companies that are actually growing during this downturn as I know that interests me as well.

For Q1 2009 we have grown 42% over Q1 2008 and are on track for 50% growth in Quarter 2.  What is great about this is that we are really making a dent in the market share of our competitors. The growth has to do with a number of factors, but as you can see below our traffic has increased almost 10x.  Our unique visitors are actually above 550,000 uniques a month.   Thanks to all of our customers that have been with us from the beginning including; Gartner, Corning, Administaff, etc.

 

B2B Options Administrator SaaS provider OptionEase gets Funding

Posted by Tom Blue on May 15, 2009 under Companies, Funding, Investing, Uncategorized | Be the First to Comment

OptionEase received Series A venture financing from GADS Option Fund this week.  OptionEase provides equity and stock option administration online.  The site is built for public companies as well as private.  They have more than 310 clients and were founded in 2006.  The two co-founders were a previous CFO and a Managing Director of an Enterprise Software Company.

Blellow: Site Review

Posted by Tom Blue on March 16, 2009 under Uncategorized | Be the First to Comment

I just read this post on Blellow so I figured I would do a review on it.  Blellow is like Twitter, but with a business focus.  There are many of these sites out there, but I do like the way they have theirs setup.

I think the best part of Blellow is their “Groups” section which allows you to discuss certain topics with fellow people that are interested in the same subject.  This is very similar to listservs except much easier.  With a listserv you are emailing the entire group and they seem to fill up your inbox very quickly.  The only problem I see with this is the spam.  I already noticed some posts like “check out my site”  If they can stop people from spamming it could be quite useful.

Blellow has other sections like blogs, projects, and meetups.  I guess they are trying to handle everything that is business focused.  I do believe that is quite bold, but you never know.  I will definitely take a look at their site in the future, but I will only be focused on the Groups section.

Freemium is not a new concept

Posted by Tom Blue on March 10, 2009 under Uncategorized | Be the First to Comment

I have seen a lot of people on Twitter discussing Freemium and how it should be the business model of the web future…   I also noticed this article byJeff Tinsley.  For those of you don’t know, freemium is basically a business model that focuses part of its revenue(and/or marketing) on free services/information and part of its revenue from a premium subscription.

There has been a lot of discussion about this type of model in the past few years and it seems it is at a peak right now, but it is a very old model and concept.    Hoovers.com has been giving away bits of information online since 1995 while some customers opted for a more detailed subscription.  My company, Lead411, has been doing the same since 2001.

Even before the web, magazines would offer some people free subscriptions so that more eyeballs were viewing their ads.

This is not an old concept, people are just just changing their focus because all of the sudden they realize they can’t survive on just ad revenue during bad times.