Bringing It To A Personal Level

"We needed a database that had all of our agent listings, commission information, companywide e-mail," said Lynn Edwards, CFO of Shorewood Realtors.

A Cisco Premier Partner and Microsoft Gold Partner, Praxis quickly knew what the client needed and how to move forward. "Lynn had severaland still does to this dayportions of [Shorewood's] business in FileMaker and needed some assistance to continue with development of the databases," Roback said. "Lynn had a vision for a database that would tie together the firm's crucial business processes."

Praxis took that business vision and made it a reality through the integration of several technologies. "We designed a database system that lives in a Microsoft SQL server at the corporate office. It is exposed to Shorewood employee PCs via 4th Dimension database software [from 4D, San Jose, Calif.]," Roback said. "This software enabled a functionality that was critical for Shorewood: full cross-platform capability."

Shorewood's off-site and branch personnel were also given secure wired and wireless connectivity. "The system runs across a WAN utilizing Cisco routers and switches, and we also put quite a bit of effort into designing security into the infrastructure, as the data being tracked is quite sensitive and must be protected at all times," Roback said.

Another part of Praxis' appeal to the SMB segment is that its 10 employeessix technical, three administrative and one salesqualifies it as a small business as well. "We associate with small biz because we are a small biz," said Jennifer Roback, Praxis' vice president of sales.

The husband-and-wife team also strongly stand by their service-centric model as being the strongest contributor to their success as a solution provider. "It's very important to build your business model around long-term relationships with your clients. That means staffing your company with the type of people that SMBs need on a regular basis," Jeff Roback added.

And it also means creating working relationships that have the opportunity to extend beyond the office walls. "We have a pretty tight relationship [ with Shorewood]. We even go to their holiday parties," Jennifer Roback said.

Apparently, the appreciation is mutual. "My relationship with Praxis is wonderful. We kind of grew up together," Edwards said. "[Praxis has] helped us grow by setting up all of our structures, they do all of the maintenancethey do everything," Edwards said. "They monitor us 24x7 and know when stuff goes down often before I do.

"We started small, they started small. We needed a companywide database and in the beginning, Jeff and Jennifer sat down and helped us do it, along with Cisco," Edwards added.