Yesterday, it was announced that HumanTouch acquired CorasWorks Corporation. CorasWorks has grown to be a leading provider of a flexible, application platform on Microsoft SharePoint with more than 1,000 customers across many industries. CorasWorks has a broad customer base with deep adoption amongst the Federal Government and Federal Government Contractors. This merger of the two companies will serve to strengthen this focus on FGC and the Federal Government and is an indication of the momentum behind solution offerings based upon application platforms delivered as a managed service.
The R3 View
Change for the better is afoot…
HumanTouch at its core is a Federal Government Contractor that has been increasingly moving towards a solutions provider. They have embraced the approach of delivering solutions that leverage application platforms delivered as a managed service and thereby greatly reduce the cost and complexity of delivering solutions on a custom services basis. They have had solutions using Force.com on Salesforce and now have CorasWorks on SharePoint. Thus, they are now able to provide solutions based upon application platforms delivered as a managed service – on-premise or in private clouds or in the public cloud.
Eleven years ago I was one of the founders of CorasWorks and served as its Vice President of Products during the early, very rapid adoption cycle of Microsoft SharePoint. I left to found R3 Business Solutions in 2009. For five years, R3 Business Solutions has focused on providing business solutions to Federal Government Contractors, Non Profits, and Commercial organizations leveraging the CorasWorks platform on SharePoint.
Over the last 2 years our focus has narrowed to more deeply support the specific needs of Federal Government Contractors. SharePoint is very widely adopted amongst FGC organizations and the use of CorasWorks as the go to application platform has increased. This momentum has been driven by CorasWorks and partners release of off-the-shelf, purpose-built solutions for Federal Government Contractors. CorasWorks has its IDIQ Task Order Management solution and the Lohfeld Consulting Group has WinCenter for Integrated Capture and Proposal Management. These solutions are being rapidly adopted by FGC companies to help them win more business and R3 is a partner for delivering each of them.
This merger will increase the amount of resources and the customer base and access of both organizations and more deeply focus their efforts to support customers in the Federal space including the Government and the Contractor community. In addition, this merger is an indication of the growing momentum of solutions designed and built on application platforms. The days of ground-up custom development are fading away as these platforms and productized solution offerings increase in availability and richness. Custom development is just too risky and costly for the majority of business applications now that this more agile approach has hit its stride.
Over the next few years, we believe that the application platform as a service trend will accelerate. Contractors’ adoption will just increase as it changes the cost/competitive equation for internal operations. The Federal Government will gradually but surely increase its adoption as the word of success spreads. This trend is really just the next step in the evolution of the cloud, and specifically, the private cloud. The “cloud”, understood as a managed service, is an infrastructure game today, but, its real value comes when you leverage to drive business value and mission results.