inRESONANCE celebrates 10th anniversary
October 1, 2009 marks the 10th Anniversary for inRESONANCE. We take pause to look at our current status, to consider our journey, and to gaze into the future.
Current Status
This last 18 months has been a challenging economic period by any measure. During that time, nevertheless, iR has added 35 new client organizations, 4 employees, and completed the two best years in the company's financial history. We are growing our client base significantly in Canada, Asia, San Francisco, Ohio and Virginia, among many other areas. In addition to our independent school growth, we have added important new clients in related areas such as student scholarship programs like PrepForPrep and Steppingstone. We have maintained our better than 95% historical customer retention rate. We have assembled an outstanding Advisory Board that meets regularly, and established strategic partnerships with the three major web companies in the market.
In the last year, we launched the FAMILY ACCESS MODULE web services for KEYSTONE, completed a data bridge or Single Sign-on (SSO) with finalsite, Silverpoint, and WhippleHill, and added another new productivity tool in the form of an annual data/procedures checkup for PORTAL clients. We also inaugurated the iR Developer Community, where FileMaker developers working in schools collaborate to create free, open source projects to benefit independent schools. We launched iRIS, a free web listing service for companies and organizations that work in the independent school market.
The Journey
iR began in 1999 as a partnership, the logical growth to my seven-year consulting work with more than 40 independent school clients. Many of you have been with us for much of our 10 year iR life, but still others have used our services for close to 17 years. Charlie Bailey, the current VP of Product Development, came on board in December, 1999. Susan McAllister, the current VP of Client Services, joined in January of 2001. We grew to a fairly stable size of 10 employees and remained there through 2006.
A significant faction of the company departed in early 2007. For six months during this transition, we struggled to both support our client base and bring on new organizations. Since that time, we have recruited several excellent employees, which now total 20. This strong growth has allowed us to reorganize and we now have four separate teams: development, implementation and support, finance/billing, and sales. We have significantly stronger and deeper teams than ever in our history and our success in these difficult times is a testament to that strength.
The men and women of iR form an impressive tapestry of skills and personalities. Our clients also represent a tremendous diversity of talent, expertise, and creativity. We especially enjoy working together at our inRESONANCE University events.
The Future
We understand that there is increased demand to provide more web services for your constituents. That said, we do not believe that the solution is to move all data and functionality to hosted web services. There is considerable downside to that choice. The general lack of flexibility and customizability means that unique independent schools and non-profit organizations must compromise their pedagogical principles to accommodate those databases.
We are committed to providing open, customizable, FileMaker Pro-based data solutions for your campus, and extending those with powerful, well-integrated web services. Our popular online application and inquiry service, PWS, is a good example of this, as is FAM, the FAMILY ACCESS MODULE, which lets families see grades, attendance and schedules online. We will soon announce the release of ONLINE REENROLLMENT services as well as an ONLINE DONATIONS module. In the area of finance, we will release a STUDENT BILLING module as well as a DATA-CONNECTOR for QuickBooks and GENERATIONS.
We remain in close association with FileMaker, Inc. as Platinum Partners. We remain confident that this software platform is healthy and improving, and that it is a solid investment for the future.
In a close knit, vertical market like ours, success depends greatly on the trust and opinions of you, our clients. We thank you all for your conversations and recommendations to your colleagues on listservs, at conferences and on the phone. We also appreciate your frank and direct communication with us when you feel that we are NOT providing you with the kind of products and services that you deserve.
We believe that our success comes from a very simple equation: provide powerful tools combined with expert advice in a long-term partnership. Technologies change, personnel change, but your need to think through your challenges with an expert partner is a constant.
We enjoy telling your stories in our Resonate Gallery on our web site and hope that more of you will contact Cathy Katz to participate. We will be launching our new inRESONANCE Facebook page soon where you will be able to interact with all the other people in the iR Family. It will not replace our support network. Facebook is for community building. You will still have the same direct connection to our support team for your individual support needs.
Thank you for being with us as we mark this exciting milestone. We value our relationship with you and hope for a long and mutually beneficial partnership in the years to come.
Best,
Kevin