Vindisys: FS Vendor’s Vendor of the Week

What is your company name?

Vindisys LLC

Please give a short bio of your company

Founded in early 2010, Vindisys is an independent consultancy specializing in mobile as a delivery channel to your customers, employees and partners. We not only help develop strategies, but analyze existing strategies and aid in their execution. We bring to bear the culmination of decades of self-service interaction originating with the IVR through the Internet to mobile.

What is your targeted market?

Our core competency has been in financial services, specifically banking and insurance. However, we also have some experience with the retail and travel industries.

Who is your competition, and what do you do better?

Our competition tends to be custom software development firms who offer strategy advice as part of their deliverables. This tends to skew the analysis not only in favor of their skills, but also frames it in terms of a mobile development approach.

Our focus is exclusively on strategy. We look at your business, the people and processes involved before looking at the technology. We help quantify the value of mobile enabling specific functions or staff members. Far too often, a strategy is boiled down to duplicating existing capabilities in the form of a mobile website and/or downloadable app. We rationalize what makes sense before you embark on your endeavor, providing a roadmap for our clients to follow.

How many current customers do you have and what is your estimated yearly growth?

We have worked with over a dozen Fortune 500 clients during the past 24 months with 120% growth year-over-year.

What types of products and/or services do you offer?

We offer a Mobile Primer, which is essentially a workshop to educate, level set and organize a client using market data and their own information prior to them embarking on a mobile initiative.

In addition, we have three other categories of engagement, Mobile Strategy Consulting, Mobile Execution Planning and Mobile Execution Support. Mobile Strategy Planning is meant to aid in development of a strategic roadmap complete with ROI analysis, initiative prioritization and business case. Mobile Execution Support involves requirements definition, RFP development and vendor selection management. Mobile Execution Support is designed as a project oversight role, providing subject matter expertise as well as supplier coordination and management.

What has been the biggest challenge you have had to overcome as a company?

Overcoming firms’ tendencies to take a tactical approach in “getting something to market” rather than a more studied, long term plan.

What else is interesting about your story?

Our experience in self-service dates back to the IVR. We have seen and experienced first-hand the evolution of self-service technology from then, through the Internet and most recently, mobile. This provides us a unique perspective on self-service customer interaction, particular as it applies to mobile given that it represents the convergence of most previous self-service touchpoints.