At A Glance:
Company:
Daston provides solutions in the areas of information technology, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) services and solutions, financial management and management consulting. Customers include leading government agencies and private industry.
Location: McLean, VA
Industry: Professional services
Advantages to Partnering With NetSuite
- NetSuite provides pre-built integration between accounting, time tracking and project management, crucial to federal government compliance.
- Easy application development through NS-BOS saves on investments in server farms and pre-production environments.
- NetSuite sales and marketing support extends Daston's reach.
- NetSuite SaaS approach makes it easy for customers to scale their investment as business circumstances change.
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NetSuite and Daston Corporation: Federal Contracting Compliance Made Easy
The Challenge:
Government work can be a feast-or-famine business where fortunes change dramatically as large contracts are won or lost. Professional services firms need the freedom to change in scale quickly, but the servers and management infrastructure that come with on-premise software do not lend themselves well to such rapid changes. In this regard, IT consulting firm Daston Corporation was no different than thousands of other SMB government contractors.
"It's very common for a small contracting firm with five or 10 people to win a contract that requires bringing on 30 people very quickly," says Randy Spruill, managing director of Daston's SaaS practice. "A SaaS solution is easily scalable, so you can bring on users when you grow without having to change your infrastructure—and if you're large but you lose a contract, you aren't going to be losing out on your investment in application servers."
In addition, intricate accounting and reporting requirements imposed by federal authorities can strain the boundaries of conventional SMB operations software, so as Daston grew, the company decided to standardize its operations on the flexible and extensible NetSuite platform.
Daston found NetSuite to be the right choice for its growing government services business, and developed customized federal compliance functionality using NetSuite development tools. That proved to be the beginning of a new business opportunity.
The Solution:
"We realized that the customized solution we developed to run our own business would be just as beneficial to thousands of other companies in the same situation," says David Stout, technical director of Daston's SaaS practice. "So we decided to start a SaaS practice within Daston, focused on NetSuite."
With thousands of federal contractors nationwide in NetSuite's sweet spot of mid-size businesses, Daston reasoned that many would be looking to improve the sophistication of their business operations software and would be drawn to one with top-notch federal compliance modules. "There are competing solutions that cater to SMB government contractors, but none with the depth of functionality NetSuite offers," Spruill says. "NetSuite already offers tight integration between accounting, time tracking and project management. Most SMB contractors today manage those in disparate systems and have to bring them together in spreadsheets."
The NetSuite NS-BOS development platform makes it easy for Daston to develop, test and deploy its vertical customizations without having to invest in additional hardware. "We don't have to go out and operate a separate server farm for testing and development. We simply work in the NetSuite production and sandbox environments, then migrate changes over to the client's NetSuite instance," says Spruill. "It can all be done seamlessly and remotely."
Not only does NetSuite offer Daston a platform of complete enterprise resources planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), and human resources (HR) functionality, but complete marketing support as well. "As a small company, we don't have a huge sales and marketing organization," says Spruill. "NetSuite has done a great job marketing itself and building a customer base. With NetSuite, we can leverage joint case studies and marketing and selling opportunities to get exposure and leverage we wouldn't normally have."
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