Guest: Hamid Shojaee - Axosoft
Host: Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
So, who are you?
Hamid Shojaee - Axosoft
So, I am Hamid Shojaee, I'm the CEO and Founder of Axosoft.
Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
And what is that?
Hamid Shojaee - Axosoft
Axosoft...
Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
It's not Microsoft or Google?
Hamid Shojaee - Axosoft
No, no it's not. So, we create software for software development teams, to help them ship their software on time.
Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
Okay. And .NET, Delphi, C++, what languages, what platforms?
Hamid Shojaee - Axosoft
Yeah, I am a big Microsoft fan. So, we've standardized on the Microsoft platform. It's all .NET latest sort of technologies. .NET1.1 is our current version, next version is going to be .NET2.0 and our product works with SQL back end. So, its all Microsoft sort of oriented. Windows platform, but we have a Web version of our product that goes cross platform for the end users of course.
Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
Okay. And so, I haven't seen your stuff and I haven't done any software development for a long time or whatever.
Hamid Shojaee - Axosoft
Okay.
Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
So, what does it do? And, who does it compare to?
Hamid Shojaee - Axosoft
Okay, great question. So, we have a number of different competitors and our product really focuses on helping software development team, ship their software. So, with that in mind the things that it needs to do is, help them keep track of who's working on what? What kinds of defects they might have in their applications? Their requirements for the application; help them enforce their processes and automate those processes. So, that with just one click a developer can sort of get a task out of the way and go on to writing code rather than being enamored with various different things that they need to do in the tool. So, our product competes with a number of products including The Jira and FogBugz all the way to like Microsoft Team System even is sort of a competitor.
Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
So, what do you think about Team System come out and why would I go with your stuff instead of (Voice Overlap).
Hamid Shojaee - Axosoft
Instead of Team System.
Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
Team System.
Hamid Shojaee - Axosoft
Excellent, question. So, Team System, the first thing to know is this sort of people were asking me all the time, so what you're going to do now that Team System is coming out and when it came out. And since, Team System has come out our sales have quadrupled. So, I think, the expectations of where Team System was going versus what OnTime does was very much, inline for people, but then they realized there's totally different types of products and they do things very differently. So, while it might take you days to sort of setup and install and configure Team System to wherever you'd want it. It takes literally a couple of hours to have an OnTime system up and running. So, ease of use is a huge deal, pricing is a big sort of differentiator. As well as, sort of the -- with respect to Team System, there is only one aspect of it that compete with OnTime and that's the task tracking essentially. And we do that for better and for superiority to Team System product, but Team System does a lot more things that we don't do.
Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
Okay. Do you recommend buying both then for your development team?
Hamid Shojaee - Axosoft
A lot of our customers have, because they use a testing capabilities of Team System, it has a lot of automated test tools, load testing, that sort of thing, or unit testing et cetera whereas, OnTime does a much better job of tracking the team. Who's working on what? What kind of requirements do we still need to get done? To customize, OnTime is a sort of a very easy process, been able to take your existing processes whether, you use different methodologies like, Scrum or Agile or the various different software development methodologies. You can implement those processes inside of OnTime very easily and quickly and be up and running very quickly. So, our customers do use it sort of side-by-side with Team System, quite a bit.
Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
What kind of team do you think -- when should I start thinking about OnTime?
Hamid Shojaee - Axosoft
OnTime. Well, I am actually have a database setup, specifically for you Robert, so that you can keep track of your interviews, as a matter of fact, but we really focus on software development teams in particular. So, anytime, we have all the way from like, single user installations of our product, where consultants will use our product to manage their projects for various different consulting gigs or custom apps that they might be developing. All the way to teams of several hundred people, who use it to collaborate on enterprise applications. We have customers that have distributed teams across the world. They have different projects sort of been used in different places all with the centralized database, of all that information. So that, sort of everybody knows what's going on and who's working on what at any given time and be able to see the status on those projects.
Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
Interesting. And what's the pricing? You mentioned pricing a little bit what -- so how much does this -- let's say I have a team of ten people, ten developers working.
Hamid Shojaee - Axosoft
Okay. Excellent question. So, we have our product actually priced lower for smaller teams than larger teams. And for a ten user version today it costs a $1,000 approximately, about a $100 per user. For larger teams, it can go up to a couple of $100 per user, but essentially sort of the same feature set and functionality for across the board. And we're sort of changing that with the next major release of our product. We're putting in features that are sort of unique to the enterprise versus the smaller guys and pricing it accordingly. So, some of that is going to change in the future.
Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
I bet you see a lot of teams that are in chaos when they come to you, right. Because what -- why they are looking at buying?
Hamid Shojaee - Axosoft
Absolutely. So, managing projects via e-mail and Excel Spreadsheets, we've found is extremely common, so we have teams of even surprisingly as many as 20-25, 50 people come to us, who prior to using our product, had never used anything. They used Excel Spreadsheets to sort of keep track of their issues and they use e-mail to assign task to each team member and of course the project manager typically uses Microsoft project or something to sort of Gantt Chart where their project is. I am a big project fan myself, I have a sort of significant project background, but what I found difficult is, I like using project, but the rest of my team never liked using project. So, I could never get them to update the status on any of the items, which is essentially how, OnTime came to be. So, I wanted to create a multi user product that each team member used and it was very simple to use. Very easy -- the user interface is from the ground up is one of its requirements is that it has to be intuitive you should never have to go to documentation to learn it, for the end user. And be able to be up and running, which is single clicks of the mouse button be able to get going on and all that good stuff. So, are you going to tell me have you started recording yet?
Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
No, no. I was just looking at screen, making sure it hadn't moved.
Hamid Shojaee - Axosoft
Okay.
Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
I don't have a camera guy. We do everything cheaper in here. It seems we are in the VC we're in the VC's and USVP's offices, they like it.
Hamid Shojaee - Axosoft
It's actually very nice, I love the courtyard.
Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
Yeah. It's really nice. So, kicking us out of the nest offices, (ph) so we are going good, our real offices about a mile away.
Hamid Shojaee - Axosoft
Nice, growing pains, right, you out grow the nest and you have to go on.
Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
How are you guys funded by the way?
Hamid Shojaee - Axosoft
We're self-funded. We actually got huge $70 investment to get us going.
Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
$70?
Hamid Shojaee - Axosoft
70, $70 it was basically for the first month of hosting services that I paid for and that was all the investment that I've ever made into the company. Ever since then we've been basically self-funded and grown organically.
Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
So, what did you do before you were doing this?
Hamid Shojaee - Axosoft
I am an Ex-Microsoftie like yourself. So, I was at Microsoft as a consultant, sort of going to Microsoft Enterprise customers, helping their sort of customer Microsoft's customers, implement .NET and development processes to help them become successful on the .NET platform, which is another reason, why I am a big fan of .NET and Microsoft Technologies. So, that sort of led to me developing sort of OnTime to keep track of my own projects, because I often manage teams of 15-20 people or whatever the case might have been. And I needed some tools to help me sort of keep track of who's working on what at any given time and that's essentially how OnTime came to be.
Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
What kind of results have you seen for your customers? Have they called you up or written you letters going, "Oh my God, you wouldn't believe."
Hamid Shojaee - Axosoft
Absolutely. So, we've gotten extremely positive feedback from our customers. They love the intuitive nature of the product, the fact that they don't really have to spend a lot of time learning it, setting it up and it really does deliver on the promise of helping software development team ship software on time. I think that's key to success has been able to deliver on sort of the core promises that your product makes and that's the core promise of our product is, to help software development team ship software on time. And if you don't ship the product, you don't have something to sell. So, that's an essential key ingredient to sort of getting there and that has propelled our growth to where we've grown 160% from the previous year and it's a sort of our momentum is even gaining further and further, it's going great.
Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
It's good to hear. What are you seeing in terms of development methodologies? Since you deal with a lot of developers, obviously, Microsoft Scrum was getting big and hot...
Hamid Shojaee - Axosoft
Yeah. Scrum seems to be the hot one right now.
Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
Explain a little bit about the different methodologies that you're seeing, how your tool fits into that?
Hamid Shojaee - Axosoft
Sure, sure. So, what we've done is, we've made our tool sort of be flexible and allow each development methodology to be implemented in the tool and for the processes of that methodology to be automated for you to be able to use the keywords from that methodology. So, for example, in some of the methodologies you use user stories instead of requirements or whatever. So, you can rename the features tracking capability of OnTime to stories and that sort of helps people connect with the methodology that they are using. They can define their processes, so that from this time, the story is requested to where it's reviewed and it goes into development process and all of those things can sort of be automated. And it can move an item and automatically reassign it from one person to another as it goes through the workflow of that methodology. So, we found that Scrum is gaining tremendous traction, because it sort of mix of a whole bunch of different methodologies and it's taken some of the good parts of each and that sort of the popular flavor of the day, but Agile is there of course MSF, Microsoft Solutions Framework has always been in the background for many and there's a ton of others that OnTime is flexible enough to meet the requirements.
Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
Interesting. And what else do you integrate into a Source Code Control System?
Hamid Shojaee - Axosoft
We most certainly do, absolutely. So, our product helps you keep track of each of the items that everybody is working on and those items often relate to a source code that's in your source code repository and we integrate with Visual Sourcesafe, SourceGear's Vault, Proforce and Subversion. So, those are the four that we currently integrate with. We also created that as a plug-in technology. So, we published the documentation for people to be able to integrate their own source Control Systems.
Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
Do you also integrate with the public web, so I could go and report a bug with your software and track that bug?
Hamid Shojaee - Axosoft
Absolutely.
Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
Like its resolution or whether you decide to fix it or not or (Voice Overlap).
Hamid Shojaee - Axosoft
Yeah. We have what we call the OnTime Customer Portal. So, OnTime is, it comes in three different flavors, we have the Windows version of the product, a Web and a Visual Studio .NET Integrated version for developers. So, they never have to leave the Visual Studio IDE.
Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
I'm sorry about the noise, we're here in courtyard.
Hamid Shojaee - Axosoft
That's okay. So, for the developers they never have to leave the VS.NET IDE to actually get a list of the work that they need to do. Now, those sort of three flavors, Windows Web and VS.NET integrators for the main OnTime users. For that team's customers or end users, we have a product called the OnTime Customer Portal, that allows their customers to be able to report defects, request features that they'd like to see in future versions of the product and that information is immediately sort of transpired to the team and the team can make notes and give status, updates et cetera, which is again automatically visible on the customer portal site. So, each customer can actually, keep track of the stuff that they have requested and what the status of those items are, as well as, any others that might be publicly viewable to all customers.
Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
Cool. Anything else, I need to know, you have a lot of (Inaudible).
Hamid Shojaee - Axosoft
Yeah, the next major release of our product has one of the things that I wanted to touch on, which we're planning for an early Q1 '07 release and autumn 2007 its sort of have been the Web interface of that has been sort of rewritten from scratch to be very much Ajaxified, if you will or dot -- what is it, the Web2.0 model right. So, we're going to do a beta of that early November and we're going to make that beta available to the first 100 people who watch this video free for up to five user. So it's like for one year. So, that's like a $500 sort of incentive for anybody who's watching this video. And we're going to create a URL at axosoft.com/scoble, where you can see this particular promotion that we're going to do for your viewers.
Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
Wow! So we'll find out if anybody actually likes your (Voice Overlap).
Hamid Shojaee - Axosoft
I am sure they do.
Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
Well, take advantage of that. So, axosoft.com/scoble.
Hamid Shojaee - Axosoft
Axosoft/scoble. Yup, yup and Axosoft is A-X-O-S-O-F-T.
Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
And that starts in early November you said?
Hamid Shojaee - Axosoft
Early November. So, hopefully -- by that time you're done with the editing.
Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
I am running about three to four weeks.
Hamid Shojaee - Axosoft
Okay. So, we'll probably be read at the same time or close to anyway.
Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
Great. Well thank you very much.
Hamid Shojaee - Axosoft
Absolutely. Thank you very much for your...
Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
Thanks for spending sometime and coming on seeing me.
Hamid Shojaee - Axosoft
Absolutely.
Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
Where are you guys located by the way?
Hamid Shojaee - Axosoft
We are in Scottsdale, Arizona.
Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
Yeah. So you'll like them (ph).
Hamid Shojaee - Axosoft
So, if there's any Scottsdale viewers by the way, we're always looking for talented people, send us your resume at, resume@axosoft.com, if you're interested.
Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
Very cool.
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