In the “old days” businesses didn’t have good intelligence on what their customers were doing.  This is no longer true.  Amazon.com’s business is based on the “people who bought this bought that” and Facebook is taking over the world because they know who is connected and that “people who like this like that“.

In 2010, Rock-Pond Solutions committed to know this about our customers.  If we are going to truly be able to serve the needs of our customers, we must know what their needs are.  If we are going to say we answer tough questions, we must know our customer’s tough questions.  More importantly we must be answering them.  We took a lesson from Amazon, Facebook and Google and built our “cloud based computing” architecture that we call ‘The Pond‘.  To find out how to improve service to our customers, we simply need to look in the Pond.

I just ran this report to see what our customers did in the first quarter of 2012.  You can see the detail for 13 of our customers and the total for all of them above. Honestly, I am happily surprised to know that they have run almost 14,000 reports.  With 150% growth in utilization from January to March and sales for the first quarter up over 200% over the first quarter of 2011, we have reached critical mass.  Not only do we know how many reports people are running, but we know that people who run this run that.  We can reach out to customers who are not running a report and let them know about it.  Recently we launched a report that did the calculations for Competitive Bidding.  We know who ran this report.

It doesn’t stop here.  Our customers need to know who in their organization is running reports, what parameters they are using when they run them and to be able to restrict who can run specific reports.  Internal and external auditors demand this information and a company’s DATA is not guaranteed to be secure without it.  In October 2011, Rock-Pond Solutions launched the Rock-Pond Developers Studio so all of our customers will have access to this information.  The first question from a security or compliance officer is, “How do I know someone has not tampered with the INFORMATION access logs?”  The answer is simple.  “They can’t.  The DATA is in the Pond.  And the Pond is secure“.

And it won’t stop there.  We have plans to connect our customers by allowing them to find out who is running a report they are running.  Our customers want to know who has the same tough question they do and how are they answering it.  Using the DATA in the Pond to connect them to the right people, our customers will be able to get the INFORMATION they need at a whole new level.  It’s like an intelligent listserv (outdated way to connect people) or a DATA driven Facebook.  Who knows, we might even connect it to Facebook.

A recent customer whose pharmacy has been in business for over 100 years, says it best of all:

“We have only had Rock-Pond for ten days.  If you take it away from me now, I don’t know what I will do!”

We are humbled by these kinds of comments.  We can’t take much credit for what we have because it is the result of the innovative customers we serve who share their tough questions with us and give us the opportunity to provide them answers they can use.

Rock-Pond Solutions has reached critical mass now and great things are happening in the Pond.  We are committed to know the needs of our customers and to help them get the INFORMATION they need from the DATA they’ve got.  We are also committed to get the INFORMATION we need from the DATA we’ve got so we can go to the next level with our customers.

If you are one of our customers or partners who is attending the 2012 NHIA conference in Phoenix,
please allow us to show you how much we appreciate you
by joining us at the Phoenix Art Museum for a Night of Appreciation.