If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. Tom Lounibos is the co-founder, president, and CEO of SOASTA, which provides cloud based web testing to optimize the functionality, performance, scalability, and reliability of websites and web applications. Prior to SOASTA, Tom served as president and CEO of Kenamea. Prior to Kenamea, he was CEO
Sramana Mitra: Given the landscape you have described and the fact that many of the startups are already thinning out, I believe that you will be getting acquisition offers from the ERP crowd as they look to move into this space. Neno Duplan: You are right, and we already have started to get those offers.
Sramana Mitra: Today when a prospect is evaluating vendors, are you always at the table? Neno Duplan: The majority of the time we are. We use guerrilla marketing to our advantage now. A lot of the companies in our space assumed they were the market leaders and they put a lot of money into advertising
Sramana Mitra: What was the structure of what you were selling? Were you offering company specific information, or was it an Internet front end to a centralized data store? Neno Duplan: It was centralized web-based model based entirely on multi-tenancy. We had a single database for every client but a common interface. The database was
Sramana Mitra: What did you initially go to market with? Was your initial offering an Internet portal for environmental data or was it consulting? Neno Duplan: We did not have a product or software offering. We had five employees and we used our collective connections to do environmental consulting. We were working on projects where
Sramana Mitra: In 1997 you recognized the potential for the Internet to be the front end interface to large amounts of data. What was your next step? Neno Duplan: That led to the beginning of Locus, which I founded in 1997. We had more domain expertise than anyone else in the world. I then set out
Sramana Mitra: What types of companies were generating the large amounts of environmental data? Neno Duplan: Consulting engineering firms working for Chevron or oil companies. Almost every gas station on every corner can be considered a contaminated site because almost every underground storage container at those gas stations has leaked at some point.
If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. Neno Duplan is the founder, president, and CEO of Locus Technologies, a provider of on-demand environmental data and information management solutions. Prior to starting Locus Technologies, Dr. Duplan held senior management positions with Canonie Environmental (W.R. Grace Company), The IT Group and D’Appolonia Consulting Engineers. Dr.