The Minnesota-based SaaS company Rocware has recently released an enhanced B2B platform offering, which allows businesses to create, connect, and intuitively maintain their expansive online product catalogs. This platform allows businesses to seamlessly connect to existing and prospective customers through private invitation, technology features found in traditional social media.
This interconnectivity creates an instant conduit for information, which allows businesses to rapidly share updated product images, descriptions, customer specific pricing, purchase order details, and more all in a secured environment. Perhaps more interestingly, these small and midsized businesses can easily exchange messages and fully engage in purchase order and invoice transactions between businesses, without EDI.
The three-member team behind Rocware brings a unique combination of personal experience running product-based businesses, the vision and technical expertise to build a novel solution, and the business knowledge necessary to bring this solution to market. Together their talents represent a complimentary skillset at Rocware.
John Erck founded and ran a toy company called Extreme Bubbles in 2005. He then spent two years in IT Solutions at Cargill. Today, John is fully dedicated to his new venture Rocware. His brother James Erck, who is also a serial entrepreneur, started and ran a screen printing company called MPLS Ink in 2007, before cofounding Rocware. The last founder is their sister, Sarah Erck Welle. Prior to cofounding Rocware, Sarah worked in database strategy at Microsoft for four years, and then worked as the Director of Business Development at a business intelligence consultancy. All three siblings graduated from the University of Minnesota.
By delivering this solution with SaaS, Rocware is inherently providing many of the benefits associated with this technology, such as a lowered cost of ownership, availability, and accessibility. They have not only leveraged this technology, in the case of transforming viral tendencies into B2B relationships, but they have also built a scalable technology infrastructure to support it. The open source solution stack LAMP resides at the foundation, which provides a necessary relational data management structure for the data. This sits on top of a cloud-based hosting solution designed to handle both present and growing volumes of product data.
Through this enhanced B2B service platform, which now accommodates such a large spectrum of small and medium manufacturers, distributors, wholesalers, and sales representatives, Rocware is poised to scale.