Rockport | The CRE SaaS Advantage Well, the interesting thing with SaaS that people don't totally realize is the economies of scale are so daunting that it's almost a force of gravity. We have 200 clients, so we're getting 200 times the resources in payment to invest in R & D, versus someone trying to build it themself, who would have to pay dollar for dollar. I think, at this point we're up to about a trillion and a half of active closed loan AUM. That doesn't count pipeline or burned-off deals, and I think we're somewhere around north of a billion data points. Homegrown systems vs. SaaS systems So, homegrown systems are built from one perspective. We have the benefit of 200 clients' feedback and perspectives versus a single company trying to build a system solely from one perspective. What is the Build vs. Buy fallacy? I don't want to be too hard on it, but there's a real problem, which is typically the internal tech team gets asked to do the build versus buy analysis. So, basically they'll look at all their outside vendors and then they provide an estimate of how long it would take to build internally. The problem is they're basically saying whether or not they should keep their job. Why do feature-based SaaS systems outperform homegrown systems? We get input on features from our 200 clients, and as a result, we can pick the best and most important and understand a lot of people's perspectives on how to build the optimal task, or workflow, or report, versus someone having to try to write it themself in a corner with simply one person's perspective, which is really hard to do the first time. Why is SaaS better than Microsoft Excel and Word? Excel and Word are amazing programs, but your data gets siloed on the desktop or a C-drive or a local box drive, and the data does not get extracted and put into a centralized data store, and as a result, you cannot run analytics and reporting at a portfolio basis. Will switching systems result in a loss of current processes? No, so, we intentionally designed Rockport to be highly configurable, including integration into Excel, so that what your people are used to using can continue to use, but we can still extract all the data and put it into a centralized system.
