The Fast & The Furious
3:00 PM EDT Fri. Jul. 21, 2006
From the July 24, 2006 issue of CRN
Page 8 of 10
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By Barbara Darrow  The EBS Group, a longtime NetSuite and Oracle partner, was founded in 2001 with three people. Now, the solution provider fields 24 employees and is adding about one person per month to keep up with its phenomenal growth, says CEO Scott Jenkins. Net sales for 2005 were just more than $3.6 million, up 219 percent from 2003.
Jenkins says it will be tough to sustain that growth rate, but he's going to give it a shot. EBS, which stands for Enterprise Business Solutions, may be small in stature, but it puts its resources where they matter, he says. And focusing on a handful of vendors lets the VAR concentrate on their wares and what they can do for the customer. EBS, Lenexa, Kan., also focuses on a few verticals—engineering, construction, health care and government, he says. "Most of our customers are in the 'M' part of SMB," with 100 to 2,000 employees, Jenkins says. Many are interested in offloading some of their IT burden on a trusted partner like EBS, which will host services, including Oracle Collaboration Suite, if they'd like or install on premises.
Jenkins says keeping abreast of the latest-and-greatest perks in their vendors' technology helps because many customers are not up to speed on that. It is a truism that most businesses focus on their business, not on the potential new IT underpinnings of that business. So if EBS can demonstrate why Oracle 10g or NetSuite 11, for example, can solve problems more efficiently and free up their internal people, that's all for the better. Most EBS customers come via word-of-mouth referrals—many from Oracle itself, Jenkins says. "In the Oracle world, we're known, and we have customer references. We were among the first to do identity management, service-oriented architectures." J.E. Dunn Construction, the sixth-largest construction company in the United States with revenue of about $3 billion and 1,500 employees, came to EBS via an Oracle referral, says Kent Immenschuh, director of information services at Dunn. "We were shopping for a portal product, trying to decide which platform to standardize on and had read some good reviews of Oracle Portal. When we contacted them for a demo and an implementation reference, they put us on to EBS," he says. It didn't hurt that EBS and Dunn are both based in the Kansas City area.
EBS also is notable for having embraced the emerging Software-as-a-Service model. In SaaS mode, vendors and partners forego the big, upfront license sales bucks in favor of a more incremental subscription-based revenue stream. Many VARs were burned in the ASP boom-and-bust, which they see as a forerunner of SaaS, and have shied away from SaaS. However, Jenkins says he believes SaaS could boost rather than erode margins.
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