If you’re a regular visitor, you may have noticed that my site has a new look. This weekend, I updated it, using Coherent Interactive’s branding. Why? Because, as I’m happy to announce, we have just signed a joint operating agreement between our company, IT DevWorks LLC, and Coherent Interactive.
My husband and I started IT DevWorks in 2007. We founded the company primarily to sell ecommerce-related tools to help developers implement payment processing through Authorize.Net. We also began doing a great deal of custom development on ecommerce websites and applications. The company has employed my very talented, developer husband full-time since inception. It’s employed me part-time on and off. (If you’re a small business owner, you know the nature of the enterprise–we both spend a lot of unpaid time on the business, doing business development, planning, marketing, etc.)
In the fall of 2008, I reconnected with a friend and co-worker from my Microsoft days, named John Purcell. John was a co-worker of mine at Microsoft, then moved to become a lead, a manager, and eventually a higher-level manager in the larger Microsoft Office organization. I’ve worked both with and for John, and have a great appreciation for his talents and his generous and thoughtful nature.
John had coincidentally started a company, Coherent Interactive, with another ex-Office person. Coherent focused on website design and development, corresponding content management and development, and workflow. They happened to be looking for a good contract .Net developer. I suggested he talk to my husband, Dave, who is a fantastic .Net developer (if I do say so myself), with a wealth of experience including database design, API development, deep knowledge of Microsoft and even Office integration, and HTML/CSS experience–plus ecommerce knowledge, of course.
John did contact Dave, and it was the beginning of a fruitful relationship for both our companies. Coherent was working on some larger projects including one for World Vision and Highway Media. Dave worked on both of them, bringing his disciplined coding style to the projects, and introducing some new methods, tools, and standards at Coherent. Ultimately, Dave become a key contributor. As John told me, “We basically look at the development side of our projects, pick the hardest part, and give that to Dave.”
This past summer, I had lunch with John again. We talked about the challenges of maintaining and growing a service business in a recession. I mentioned that Dave and I were finishing up our second product, CIM Library, and had some others in mind. Unfortunately, as a mom & pop shop, we had a limited ability to invest time into product development. Still, we were eager to do so, as the steady income of products provides a nice cushion and counter to the ups and downs of the service business.
The idea appealed to John, as well. We started talking about our two companies and how they complemented one another. The more we talked, the more apparent it became that a closer relationship could build a stronger service business that could better serve both our clients, while also providing the opportunity to do more product development. Moreover, the principals in each company had worked together long enough to know that we could work together effectively, and our skill-sets complimented each other very well.
In the last few months, we’ve been working closely with both John and his very capable business development manager, Kathryn Wachs. Under Kathryn’s leadership, we started having focused discussions in January. We also began working together informally–allowing Dave and I to benefit from Kathryn’s business development knowledge and experience, as we’ve worked together on proposals for clients.
This week we signed a Joint Venture Agreement between Coherent Interactive and IT DevWorks. We’ll be working together to market and execute on products and services, specializing in doing website and backend development, ecommerce, and social media strategies.
We’re still in the process of updating both the Coherent site and IT DevWorks sites. You’ll be seeing changes to both sites and to this blog, as time goes by. In the meantime, if you’d like to know more, see our social media services page or Coherent Interactive. And if you’re interested in our ecommerce products, becoming PCI-DSS compliant, or creating/updating an ecommerce site, go to IT DevWorks.
I can’t even begin to tell you how excited I am about this new relationship. We foresee a bright future–and hope you, as part of my larger community, will be a part of it!
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