Business Name: SourceFuse
Interviewee: Kelly Dyer
Website address: www.sourcefuse.com
We (Source Fuse) are a global team of 150 technologists that drive digital transformations by leveraging cutting-edge cloud computing and streamlined user experiences. We help companies build and launch software products, and drive internal efficiency through technological innovation. We take a partnership focus with our clients and bring strategy, insight, and 13 years of experience building next-generation applications to the table to do more than just be a software vendor. We are one of the few Amazon AWS Advanced Consulting partners in the southeast and have deep expertise in leveraging AWS and the cloud.
Wes Benwick
Welcome back to BluHorn TV, I’m Wes Benwick. This is our show. Making a Difference. Joining us today is Kelly Dyer with Source Fuse, Kelly welcome to our show. Thanks.
Kelly Dyer
It’s good to be here, thanks for having me.
Wes Benwick
How would you describe development as a service.
Kelly Dyer
Yeah. It’s you say well it’s not just outsourcing right. We don’t see ourselves typically as a vendor or just an outsource. We like to be a strategic partner a strategic member of the team, of the product, of the direction of the company really and kind of add value across the way. So in terms of development team it’s a service it’s really committed to software lifecycle. There’s phases that goes there. You need different skill sets along with some consistency in those underlying elements to go. So the architecture, the dev ops and deployment aspect, getting stability in that and continuity and that is critical when you’re building and evolving software so expertise at that layer key.
Wes Benwick
I look at it as much more modular as the traditional approach to software development and certainly the ability to bring in experts as needed, not have to worry about the hiring model where you have to interview different outsource candidates or outsource companies, the ability to go to you guys and say hey we want to develop a specific feature. Who do you have that’s already done it? You plug them in just for the period of time we need. And then we move on to whatever our other development course is. I think that’s pretty powerful. What caused you to come up with an idea?
Kelly Dyer
Well so it started from building software SAS products myself. So when the initial ones were Inventory Source, which is still up and running and growing quickly in the e-commerce space. it’s kind of a standalone SaaS product for retailers and distributors. Out of that came other implementations, initially it was open source projects about twelve years ago implementing Enterprise Open Source and kind of evolving that and then working with others customers, friends I guess, that became customers to build their software products. So the act of doing that over and over again showed the similarities that are crossed and transcend whether it’s industry or product or how to build good software or how to run a good team. I wanted to build a better way of doing it.
Wes Benwick
Absolutely and I can speak personally to how great the relationship and the work quality has been as a result because the developers and Operation infrastructure staff that you have working for you the actual and full time employees of Source Fuse right?
Kelly Dyer
Yeah. Yeah. Everyone is. We’re about one hundred and eighty five people at this point across four, soon to be five, global offices. So it kind of spread out and we are a global team. We kind of act as if we’re in the same place. You know obviously that’s what you do with technology these days and we work in this blended team structure where the right kind of roles are filled in the right locations and we kind of feel expertise as a team.
Wes Benwick
I think that’s a very powerful thing. In your opinion, when is it the right time for a company who wants to get into the software space develop an app or develop a software as a service model?
Kelly Dyer
I think it depends. I mean the right time to really engage is when you have a budget and you have a clear direction. But in terms before that, our team likes to speak with people who have a notion or an idea or an opportunity they’re thinking of pursuing and help kind of craft what to think about and what not to think about for some of the common pitfalls. But you know ultimately that you need a budget, you can’t work for free. I think you should engage when there’s a clear business case for the need and more. We work in a lot of companies that aren’t software companies, they might be service companies trying to transform digitally transform in the cloud, transform over mobile, so they’re not software companies so they don’t have that process yet and it’s not that they have that common policy there is I’ll just go hire some developers and we’ll build some things. Existing companies that aren’t software companies in particular but know they need better internal systems that they know there’s an opportunity for them to have found money through a new offering to their customers on a software or mobile perspective or better operational tool internally from reporting and an integration perspective. That’s really where we can bring a ton of value as well and engage really early to help you know show how we can come in on just making things more efficient and making more money.
Wes Benwick
And you are doing it correctly.
Kelly Dyer
Oh yeah. Technology keeps changing and it’s changing in an increasingly rapid pace. So we do partner with the leading technology providers out there so for Amazon we are one of the top partners in the southeast. We work closely with a lot of their partners and they bring us new clients because we worked with basically the whole spectrum of it. Now there’s another technology party which we’re kind of implementing because we know we can see that they do great things, they power all internal messaging, and it is very large scale and had a lot of capability. With BluHorn we can kind of introduce more real time interaction and real time edits by incorporating this proven technology to do it in a very cost effective way. So you know we are always trying to stay partnering and up to speed on all the latest and greatest technologies out there so that we can actually apply them across budgets.
Wes Benwick
Excellent stuff. I’m a huge fan of your company and what you’ve done to help move BluHorn to the next level. Thank you so much for joining us on making a difference. You can learn more about BluHorn on our website BluHorn.com. Again I’m West Benwick, and this Is making a difference.