Help Is On The Way--The OnForce Way

When VARBusiness last caught up with OnForce in 2006, the New York-based technology services marketplace was looking forward to expanding internationally in 2007. More than a year later, the company is now based in Lexington, Mass., has upped its total completed work orders from more than 300,000 to more than 500,000, now boasts more than 10,000 service professionals and has enjoyed a full year under its new steward: CEO Peter Cannone, the former senior vice president of sales operations for PC Connection who joined OnForce in January 2007.

And yes, it's international: OnForce's latest success was an expansion into Canada, and in December it announced plans to expand into the United Kingdom and Germany. Its continued success hinges on how skillfully it grapples with two realities of the technology industry: that the single greatest need in IT, as Cannone says, is service support; and that you can't build a trustworthy reputation overnight.

It's the latter point that has required finesse; finding people who can provide a service, for a fair price, in a small amount of time will always be a market need, no matter what the state of the economy. The technicians who sign up to represent OnForce are rated on a six-star scale through the marketplace: the more jobs they do at a high level, the more attractive their online profile--viewable by all OnForce users--becomes, and the more work they receive for their services as that profile matches them up more frequently with work requests. And the more work they receive for their services, the more transaction fees OnForce receives at $11 a pop. The company's database continues to update and reinvent itself on a minute-by-minute, job-by-job basis, and OnForce insures all of its technicians and handles both their payments and 1099 tax forms. It's also now entirely paperless--even work order signatures are done digitally.

"It's not just something you can start up tomorrow," Cannone said. "The OnForce platform enables our provider community so they have lots of work coming to them. We've built a community of tremendous providers who not only have skills but are also an absolutely wonderful group of folks. What that gets you is a loyal following of buyers who have used us in all different ways and all different jobs."

"Once they have a buyer account on OnForce, they're no longer local or regional," added Senior Vice President of Marketing Paul Nadjarian. "They have access to send a work order all over the country. They're, in effect, national."

What has sustained OnForce so far is its ability to alleviate the "Who's this guy and why should I pay him?" skepticism: the scope of its offerings and the ratings system ensure that a user of OnForce's services can learn as much as possible about the technician and work whose services that user is purchasing before the user commits.

"[It's] only as good as the face that shows up to do the work, and if that face can't get it done technically, that's a blemish on my company," said Gary Dedoussis, CEO of Core Technology Solutions in Parsippany, N.J., a three-year OnForce partner. "To some extent, you are taking a chance. That's why OnForce is a high-value product, because you're not just trading bodies--they provide concise, informative stuff, and the platform has kept evolving to ... where more information can be available."

OnForce is now doing "the heavy lifting" on its European ventures--figuring out how to adapt the OnForce model to different languages and different financing structures. Its international efforts have also been aided, thus far, by another perspicacious by-product of their model: social networking. Technicians worldwide can seek advice from one another as to how to solve problems from different time zones, and also network for their own opportunities.

Where branding is concerned, Cannone said, it isn't important that an end user knows the serviceperson who shows up to help is an OnForce technician. But the ability of market players to promote the fact that they have OnForce capability--both Cannone and Nadjarian liken the idea to "Intel Inside" and similarly legendary branding phrases--goes a long way toward cementing the company's reputation.

"We're not owned or tied to any one player," Cannone points out. "We're in one business, which is building the world's largest and best marketplace for IT service professionals, and that's the only business." n

" It's bringing specific, technical skill sets and moving them to where our buyers most need the help, whether VoIP, wireless, high-def TVs, whatever. "