Interpath CEO: It's All About the Customer

"Our vision is a back-to-the-future customer care axiom," says Schleicher. "In other words, we want to lead the customer care revolution in the industry so we really put the 'S' back in ASP."

Schleicher, whose company was formerly a wholly-owned subsidiary of Carolina Power & Light that changed ownership last year after receiving $100 million in financing from Boston-based Bain Capital, thinks the first generation of pure-play ASPs ran into serious problems with customers after being billed as the cure-all for all IT problems and then failing to deliver on many of those promises. Ironically, he thinks many of those failures had less to do with poor operations and more to do with the lack of defined engagements.

"I would argue today that I think the ASP model actually is a cure-all for most things, but it only works when you have an established SLA and an established outcome so you can define the project up front and define how you are going to get there and then define the time frame," Schleicher says.

"Being a second- or third-generation ASP, at least we have a goal to measure from--when you can say, 'Yes I can do it,' or 'No I can't.' If you don't define the project, then you end up with the deliverer of the solution disappointed because the solution attributes always change. And then the customer isn't happy either. So you have to define up front what the solution is going to be, and then you have to deliver it and be held accountable for it."

The strategy seems to be paying off, considering Interpath was named one of the industry's 12 most successful ASPs by research company IDC last month. Its list of clients includes a number of established companies, including Bayer, Blue Cross/Blue Shield, Nortel Networks and UPS.

Another key to Interpath's customer-centric ASP strategy is the way it selects vendor partners. Interpath, which considers itself a full-service enterprise ASP serving midmarket companies, currently has strategic relationships with a number of software companies, including Vignette, Microsoft and BroadVision for

e-commerce; Pivotal for CRM; and a soon-to-be announced partner in e-procurement.

To that end, Interpath takes a number of things into consideration when looking at potential vendor partners. The first and foremost is whether or not the vendor's products fit the mid-market."

"We look at it and say, 'Ok, who has an ISV solution that we don't think is overkill that actually works for the midmarket?'" Schleicher says. "There are some solutions that actually work great for the Fortune 100--like Oracle and Siebel. Sure they're great ISV solutions, but is that the right solution for a $100 million company? Has [it been] proven that they can scale down? We would say no."

That's not to say Schleicher would be averse to working with a larger company like Siebel Systems if the opportunity arose. In fact, the CEO hinted that his company may be looking into some sort of a partnership with Siebel in the near future.

After that, Interpath looks for companies that have what it considers the "right attitude in dealing with partners and customers," an ability to stay on the leading edge of emerging technologies. "In our particular case, when we were looking at Pivotal we saw that they have a very strong and emerging relationship with Microsoft, which we think is very important from the e-commerce standpoint. They also have a vision for the wireless world that's the same [as ours]. So we think that makes a lot of sense."

Last, but not least, a potential vendor needs to have experience in the ASP channel and a solution set that can be easily transformed to the subscription-based model. "Do they have an ASP strategy? Because if they don't already have an ASP strategy, we don't want to create it for them," Schleicher says.