“You Do Not Have To Make a Trade-Off Between Price, Features, Reliability and Customer Service ” – Interview with Adam Sandman, Director at Inflectra

We asked Adam Sandman, director at Inflectra, a few questions about his company and view of the markets they serve.

GetApp: Who are you and what is your role in the company?

I’m a director at Inflectra. My previous career was at IT consulting firms such as Sapient. In my previous assignments I was frustrated by the lack of affordable tools to manage our IT projects, so joining Inflectra was a natural path. Inflectra is dedicated to providing powerful but affordable tools for managing software lifecycles.

GetApp: Are you a Cloud or a Software-as-a-Service company?

Inflectra provides it software both as a fully hosted Software as a Service (SaaS) offering and also as a downloadable product that can be installed on a company’s private/public PaaS or IaaS. For example many customers will choose to download and install our products onto an Amazon EC2 instance or Rackspace instance.

GetApp: How do you use and promote usage of Cloud Computing?

We promote cloud computing by having web-based fully hosted applications that reduce the IT support costs of deploying ALM applications such as SpiraTeam or help-desk / IT service management applications such as KronoDesk. With our cloud solutions for a single monthly fee they get the entire support package – software, mobile access, hosting, backups, support and upgrades – with no organic IT staff needed.

GetApp: What are the points of difference of your solutions?

Unlike many of our competitors we believe that requirements management, test case management, project planning, help desk and bug-tracking are not individual islands to be purchase separated and integrated at great time and expense. We provide a comprehensive, powerful ALM suite that provides all these areas of functionality fully integrated. Another large point of differentiation is that we believe that such powerful solutions do not have to be ruinously expensive. We have scaled our business to be frugal, ensuring that we can provide the most value in terms of functionality for the lowest-cost price.

GetApp: How would you like to be evaluated by a prospect?

Typically most prospective customers coming to our website to learn about our products will have a specific need – a test management system, a scrum agile planning tool (for example). They will find that we can provide a complete ALM solution that covers both their immediate needs and the functionality they had only considered for the future. The great thing is that they can deploy just the parts they need right now, but have the ability to expand the functionality seamlessly once they need the additional features.

GetApp: Why do your customers buy from you?

They purchase from us because we offer easy-to-use, easy to purchase solutions that provide the functionality they need without needing formal user training at a price that is reasonable and attractive. We also provide very responsible customer support that most customers will attest is the best in the industry. We have customers migrating from equivalent systems from much larger companies that provide inferior functionality and far less responsive customer support.

GetApp: Can you mention some of your key clients?

Absolutely, they are listed on our website (http://www.inflectra.com/Company/Customers.aspx). We have large customers such as Computer Associates, Morningstar, Deutsch Bank, Alcatel-Lucent, Enterprise Arts, Dolby, Booz Allen & Hamilton, BAE Systems, Ralph Lauren, Cap Gemini.

GetApp: What do you see as the key trend emerging in the industry?

We see a fusion of the development lifecycle (also known as Application Development Lifecycle Management ADLM) and the IT service management lifecycle (help desk, etc.) into a unified Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) domain. What this means is that customers need to be able to tie in their customers / users ideas and feedback into the product design, development and testing process in a real-time basis. With our SpiraTeam and KronoDesk products working together we are already ahead of the game in this regard. We also see a move to push testing and other SDLC activities into the cloud as part of the nascent DevOps push.

GetApp: What is THE most important message you feel you should get across to someone considering buying your solutions?

There is a common belief that when it comes to software, you have to make a trade-off between price, features, reliability and customer service. We are always striving to produce applications that are highly reliability, rich in functionality, and yet extremely affordable. As rare as this combination is, we believe that you should not have to settle for anything less!