This is the story of JARtool. A simple MS Access application that ended up running USD $2bn worth of quotes through before it was superseded. It was also the seed that would grow and ultimately lead into a startup.
It is 1998 I had just joined Sun Microsystems Australia as an Account Executive for service sales. The sales territory was well defined however there was limited information readily available on the customer, hardware/software that had previously been sold to the customer and also the status of the existing service Contract base (this is pre-CRM days). To me that was a challenge as having come from the aviation industry the decision making was very much made on data.
A quick visit to the local IT department resulted in some data from various systems being pulled. Perfect. With that I was able to compile a picture of my territory. It was cumbersome so I used MS Access to build something that was easier to use and navigate around. As I also had a softcopy pricelist I evolved this MS Access database into a quoting tool and would build quotes and send to the customer for signing. The company internal way was to send off a request to Sales Support Order Administration and ask them to provide a quote for you. Very cumbersome with a turn-around time of a day or so versus my tool that could do it in 15 minutes.
Things were going well and I was moving a lot of business using my MS Access database as an enabler. I went back to the local IT department and asked if they could schedule the same set of data I had previously asked for to be extracted to a folder overnight everynight. No problem. A cronjob was setup and my refreshed data extracts were available to import each morning. Macro’s were build into the MS Access database to automate and make life easy for tasks like importing and munging the data. I had a daily picture of what was going on in territory.
Fast forward to the end of the first financial year that I had been with Sun Microsystems and I surprised to receive the award of Sun Microsystems Australasia Service Sales Representative of the Year. I had signed up more business than all the other sales reps in the region. The old school sales reps were intrigued how a new starter to the company had come in and sweep to the top. The MS Access database was named JARtool after my initials. It was mandated that all sales reps across Asia Pacific use the tool. JARtool had a quick makeover and was improved to include multi-byte functionality which included traditional and simplified Chinese, Korean and Japanese. The next 3 weeks were spent travelling around Asia Pacific training all other sales reps how to use JARtool.
For three years JARtool reigned as the multi-byte sales quoting tool set for use by sales reps and account managers across Asia Pacific and parts of EMEA.
This was to be a start of a string of initiatives to liberate information to the field by the rollout of a robust data systems including APAC Service Sales Dashboard and WOW.
In 2003 the technology that I had created was spun out of Sun Microsystems and the startup Data Infinity was born.