Where’s Wolcott?
That’s what some folks who attended a Jan. 25 Web show run by daly.commerce (that’s daly-dot-commerce) may have wondered at first. John Cannington, president of the Providence-based software company formerly known as Daly & Wolcott, announced the name change at a seminar showing off the company’s retooled image and its latest product to local customers.
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They were actually making the same announcements during a whirlwind week long tour that started here and stopped in Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas and Irvine, Calif. Those are all locations where daly.commerce has branch offices.
Company executives decided to change the name to emphasize its new focus on e-commerce and its kin i-commerce.
Besides that, John Wolcott, who helped Terrance J. Daly start the software venture in 1977 left the company around 1979.
Daly started the business in his home with an initial investment of $3,000 and a promise to his wife that he would quit “when the money was gone,” he told the Providence Business News in March 1997. Initially they did a lot of consulting work for established companies. The computer software company gradually evolved into a $20 million a year business. It now employs about 225 people across the country.
”About a year ago, when I joined the company Terry Daly and I sat down and outlined a strategy for reinventing Daly & Wolcott,” Cannington told a crowd of about 100 people who attended the Web show at the Providence Marriott. “We’re a very different company today than we were a year ago.”
The name change represents “a very strategic focus on Internet enabling,” he said.
Mike Kilgore, the company’s marketing vice president, said changing names after 22 years in business is a worthwhile risk.
“It really makes sense. There’s always risk in identity change … but really our company has been built not on strong marketing, but on strong delivery capabilities,” Kilgore said. “Therefore we really don’t have the name recognition that our size would justify. So there’s always risk, but it’s worth it.”
The Daly & Wolcott name was retained over the past 20 years or so, because it “sounds like a professional firm,” Kilgore explained. “Terry (Daly) pretty much left the name on for the prestige sound.”
The company’s newest product, web@work, is a full-featured Web storefront designed to integrate various parts of a business distribution system, including warehousing, purchasing and the financial side. It allows users to access some of the company’s other staple products – Sales & Order Management as well as Application Plus – directly from the Web.
With the new name and new product, daly.commerce is capitalizing on its belief that more and more companies will be directly doing business with their vendors and suppliers over the Internet. In fact that’s what the latest catch phrase i-net means: business dealings that result in some sort of Internet transaction whether it be ordering widgets, tracking packages, or getting payments.
”This is what we’re calling rapid revolution, because we’re evolving our business but we’re not tearing it down and starting over,” Kilgore said. “We’re still targeting the customers we always did.” The difference, he said, is that “we’re saying that businesses are under pressure” to expand online operations.
“Early adapters are really going to realize more competitive advantage,” Kilgore said. “We feel, without being condescending, we need to educate our customer base so they are quicker to move.”
Bruce Temkin, a senior analyst with Forrester, a Cambridge, Mass., research firm, told Web show attendees that business transactions conducted over the Internet are expected to reach about $3.2 trillion within the next five years. By the year 2003 about 5 percent of the world’s sales are likely to be conducted via the Internet, he said.
Some strictly Internet-based companies are already doing big business. For instance, Temkin said he’d checked the value of four Internet companies – Yahoo!, Excite, eBay, and Amazon.com – before leaving his office for the daly.commerce event. What he found was that the companies’ combined value was about $60 billion.
In addition, Temkin said, that day he’d discovered Amazon.com, which sells books over the Net, was worth four-and-a-half times the combined value of store-based book retailers Barnes & Noble Booksellers and Borders Book Shops.
Other announcements made at the event:
On Feb. 8, daly.commerce plans to open an 11-person office in a Toronto suburb, to be called daily.commerce.ca, Cannington said. “We believe Canada is going to be an exciting market for us,” he added.
Under the guise of a program called daly.capital they will offer customers financing options, which would spread customer payments out for software, hardware and other products.
