From Veetro to WORKetc - our story

Short version:

  • Privately owned company
  • Operating since 2004
  • Headquartered in Sydney, Australia
  • Technical support and product development based in Halifax, Canada
  • Happy customers from 16 countries, although 86% of customers come from the USA
  • Resold in Australia by Telstra, Australia's largest telecommunications provider
  • Founded by Daniel Barnett
  • Big future ahead...

Long version:

Our concept of a software platform that could run your entire business originally came from a small, but rapidly expanding web design business.  As business owners, we quickly realized how challenging growth is and set up about putting in place the systems and processes that would allow our little business to become a big business.

Being software guys, all our systems revolved around automation and making them available online.  This was 1999 and the tools we built for internal use had the project name "eNet".  eNet worked for our business, but because coding back then was pretty immature and the internet run on dial-up, it was a solution that we needed to run from our local small business server.

After 3 years of running eNet, our customers were eventually exposed to the concept of online management and demanded similar systems to help them run their business.  Rather than identifying the commonalities between small business, we built separate, customised solutions each time.  We were young and didn't quite see the opportunity to productise our service!

But it was largely a concept ahead of its time.  Whilst SAP, PeopleSoft and Oracle built huge enterprise resource planning tools, the concept that a small business could benefit from their own online management platform was still foreign.  Additionally, the internet was still pretty lumpy, not everyone had broadband and the programming languages still required pages to load each time something changed.

Whilst the core team separate for a few years to pursue their own projects, the idea wouldn't die.  Salesforce.com had launched, was quickly building momentum and opening up the market. 

We reformed, retooled in 2005 and developed smarter Object Oriented data serialization and maintenance techniques with a view of enabling what is now WORKetc, with the flexibility to adopt to most small business requirements. A data serialisation layer which is completely "self healing", performs automatic database schema modifications, yet is still based on the rock solid Microsoft SQL Server platform now supports the very core of WORKetc.

Application design and maintenance suddenly became a exceptionally efficient (and stress free!), particularly since the API supported useful programming features such as C# generics, object inheritance and collections. Adding a new feature or expanding on an existing object class could be done without even thinking about how to upgrade thousands of existing databases. Upgrades can be deployed simultaneously to thousands of accounts, across multiple disparate servers, with no down-time experienced by end-users.  For our customers this means we can perform updates in literally hours instead of weeks - you can read how our customers feel about this in the testimonials.

We built a brand new system called Veetro in 2005 based on the new data serialization layer. The product was designed first and foremost as a SOAP/XML webservice and business logic platform. Consuming the web service was a web-based user-interface which we ended up giving away at no charge until we could find a way to make money off of it. This process ended up being an invaluable test bed for the webservice business layer, performance/stress testing, and for the first time it allowed us to see what other companies are really needing and using from a web-based business management system. Because features were so easy to build and maintain, Veetro ended up having a very large amount of functionality from launch day.

We also realized pretty quickly that you can't give away a product as powerful as WORKetc and expect to earn money from pay-per-click advertising.  When people are working on their business, they don't click on advertising.  It seems so obvious today...

In 2007 we started to seriously work on rebuilding Veetro 's user-interface with a 100% focus on usability. Now that the business layer was well tested, we had a solid application foundation and user feedback to build on. Close to the launch of our UI re-write, we received a trademark challenge. We subsequently re-branded Veetro into WORKetc (a much better name anyhow!). This is the product you see today.

The future of WORKetc

As a company, we have no plans on slowing down. In fact we've just deployed dedicated hardware in Australia to meet growth from that region. We are working with a number of large resellers, such as Telstra in Australia, to deliver WORKetc to more and more business owners, freelancers and entrepreneurs.  We're also looking to build out an iPhone, Blackberry and Windows' Mobile client.  Stay tuned.


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