IBM WebSphere

So the bigger the business, the more money they got to spend, the more they're used to spending.

and the more niche you go onto a specific technology platform, so let's say you focus on just Salesforce, just WebSphere, just NetSuite, whatever it is, you figure it out for yourself, but a niche enterprise consulting is an incredible way to get similar margins, literally no cost other than a decision, and really build a business that, what I did is I took that consultant, that became Spheric.

I essentially funded Spheric with that money that I made and then rolled it in and built a company of people like me and some technology.

So it can be the beginning of something much larger, but that is a big idea for you to explore.

Wow.

Was it part of like the WebSphere world kind of?

Yeah, there was a software division inside of IBM where WebSphere sat.

We sat and a few others.

But, you know, we actually acquired, we didn't acquire, but we absorbed some of the IBM software assets that we then helped take to market as well.

So we realized the big giant in this space was IBM.

So guess what? We did an unbelievably obvious thing, which was we wrote right into the core of IBM's stack and made sure we worked better than anybody else did with IBM's DB2 products and also their WebSphere products and their middleware and also with their tooling even.

And the result was not terribly surprising.

We ended up getting huge revenue uplift, not just because people were able to sell our product to IBM, but because it brought credibility to us that IBM was actually partnering with us and was taking our product to market.

So I got involved pretty early in the product.

The interesting part about it was we had built something similar at Staples for our commerce platform, and we were trying to transition away from the legacy IBM WebSphere.

And so this became a platform that we served everybody that wasn't Amazon.

that doesn't have all the capabilities that Amazon had.