practiceprofile
Net@Work: On the rise
BY SETH FINEBERG
The firm has grown from fledgling VAR to high-volume IT concern
databases and the SalesLogix Cloud Edition
from smart phones, and, shortly, Blackber-ries. Net@Work’s On The Go app currently
has a user base of 500 and growing.
AT A GLANCE
Firm:
Net@Work
Headquarters:
New York City
co-presidents:
Alex and Edward Solomon
no. of staff:
139
no. of offices:
7 (due to increase soon to 10)
revenue (2009):
$22.3M
year founded:
1996
services:
IT consulting; reselling, implementing and supporting accounting, ERP, CRM and document
management solutions; systems
integration; Web and mobile application development; Web site
design and development
Over the nearly 15 years since its founding, Net@Work has evolved from a simple network support company to a full-service I T consultancy and one of the country’s
largest Sage resellers.
Now, the New York-based company stands
poised to expand nationally pending a soon-to-be completed acquisition, and will focus
on growing its publishing portfolio of original
applications.
With approximately $23 million in revenue
and a staff of roughly 140, Net@ Work ranked
No. 9 on Accounting Today’s 2010 Top 100
VAR rankings.
Co-presidents and brothers Alex and Edward Solomon never envisioned their company’s current scope while they attended business school and were running both a catering
business and a paper distribution company
before founding Net@Work in 1996.
Over the years, the company’s growth
has come primarily via M&A, the Solomons
revealed. It has also added many of its own
proprietary offerings to provide a full range of
IT services and solutions, including accounting and CRM software, custom application
Alex (left) and Edward Solomon
development, document management and
information security services.
“When we got into this business, we were
in school. We didn’t have a business plan
and we didn’t have a tech background, but
our leg up was the fact that we were busi-
ness people and surrounded ourselves with
the right [tech] people,” explained Alex. “We
thought that not only would we be a great ser-
vice company, but we would be a developer
with our own applications. We had some big
years and never got into developing our own
apps. We did add-ons, but never became a
publisher until now.”
The next step in the firm’s evolution lies
in developing mobile applications and ser-
vices. Toward that end, the firm officially
assembled its “On The Go” team in August
to support its mobile strategy. The team cur-
rently consists of marketing director Marc
Mandelbaum, CRM practice director Danny
Estrada, and developers Ronan Sheridan and
Sergey Morozov.
One of their key developments has been
the release of an On The Go mobile application for iPhones and Android phones that allows users to access Sage SalesLogix 7. 52 CRM
going mobile
“Once I explain the app idea [to potential us-
ers], rather than just trying to sell it, everyone
[we showed it to] got on board,” said Sheri-
dan. “The eye-opener for us was when we saw
the amount of app downloads in areas like
Asia and Australia. We’re on 60 blogs now.
People are surprised it’s free; you have com-
panies charging $30 to $40 for their business
apps. We wanted it to be a compact offering
and we built it so we could get feedback and
expand on it.”
But the app itself, and any similar ones to
be developed in the future, are just the sur-
face of what the firm envisions.
Alex explained that the biggest part of the
effort is that the firm is currently receiving
requests to build mobile apps for other companies and resellers, either for a particular
vertical they are in or for an existing application. “From a product perspective, it currently allows [resellers] to sell more SalesLogix.
Now we are getting validation and we need
to finish other versions, but overall this represents a major new focus for us,” he said. “We
will look for gaps in the market and fill those
gaps with our own applications.”
recession pressures
Despite its overall success, Net@Work did
not escape the stresses of the economic crisis, particularly over the past 18 months. The
owners admit that it was one of the few times
they had to be introspective.
After years of double-digit year-over-year
growth, Net@Work saw the pace begin to ebb
and decided, first and foremost, that it did not
want to downsize its staff or trim service. Spe-
cifically, Alex claimed that the firm had been
on a growth path of between 15 and 30 per-
cent every year for nearly a decade, and when
that pace slowed, they realized that growing
a business “was not about just size.”
“Things like being a debt-free organization
were also very important, and we learned
what to invest in and we are now able to capi-
