Have you ever put a new CMS, marketing or e-commerce tool in place to address a specific problem, only to find an ever-increasing workload and new problems emerge?
During the recent years, cloud and the software-as-a-service approach have been differentiators in a crowded and fast-moving marketplace, yet these have rarely really addressed the customer need for a dramatically reduced time-to-market.
Today most of our members working in large, complex and global organisations remain plagued by custom solutions and digital efforts that don’t scale, both in terms of cost and resources required.
Coredna is a Boston-based start-up with Australian roots that attempts to address these problems. Coredna is also an active member of the Boye community, including the US Software Product Manager Group. I met up with their CEO and Founder Sam Saltis on a recent trip to the US, to further understand their disruptive approach.
Don’t customise if you don’t have to
With a 15+ year digital agency background from Australia, Sam has experienced the ins and outs of digital projects and have seen customers overinvest in software for their digital communication projects or marketing stack, only to find painful long implementation cycles, costly integration demands and increasing costs.
One of the key parts of the Coredna approach is to offer a pre-built stack, which means that out-of-the-box Coredna comes with ecommerce, content marketing, CMS and intranet features. Unlike other vendors, say like Kentico or Sitecore, Coredna offers more than a toolbox that needs to be customised for each and every implementation, Instead it comes with the features ready to deploy and use and then you can customise only if you have a very specific requirement.
This translates to both reduced implementation times (weeks rather than months), but also removes the continuous pain felt by others which have to worry about upgrading their custom code when a new version arrives. This has certainly been a regular conversation in many groups with members using Adobe Experience Manager or similar solutions loved by the analyst community.
The ecommerce platform Shopify takes a similar approach to transactional websites and has been skyrocketing in popularity.
Innovating faster
Compared to the more well-known vendors, Coredna has a substantially smaller engineering team, yet are still able to innovate fast, release new features and fix bugs at an enviable pace.
When I spoke to Sam about this, his answer started with this question:
What is cloud really?
According to Sam, their impressive rate of innovation is not only because Coredna only has 1 product line to maintain, but also because they are a true software-as-a-service vendor (SaaS).
Unfortunately like many other terms in this industry, SaaS has been surrounded by hype and confusion and to many vendors, what it really means is: We host it for you. Really what they deliver are platforms – digital infrastructure – which you then need to customise and implement for each and every project. This makes it so much harder to release new features as testing is much more complex given the different customisations out there with customers.
Scaling your digital efforts for growth
While scalability is the holy grail to entrepreneurs and start-ups around the world, it is also very relevant to older, larger and complex organisations making the digital transformation. We all need to use digital to scale our businesses.
When it comes to pricing, Coredna starts at USD $500/month and goes upwards towards $20k/month based on consumption criteria.
With most organisations looking into 2018 with an ever more complex stack of various tools ranging from CRM via marketing automation to CMS and digital workplace platforms, we need a fundamentally different approach if we want lift-off to ever happen.
With demanding customers like Nintendo who hosts about 200 domains on the platform, Coredna has the potential to both change the game among several software categories and also help customers escape the usual gravitational forces.
We’ll be watching closely!