No. The title of this post isn’t a typo.
It occurred to us as we were thinking about crowdfunding, which Wikipedia defines like this:
Crowdfunding is the practice of funding a project or venture by raising money from a large number of people … typically via the Internet.
Then we thought about the time, the effort, and the money (not crowdfunded) we put into developing Cloud Claims. We wondered why no one had ever thought of calling the investment in developing software, the functionality of which is delivered from the cloud, as cloudfunding. We still don’t know. But we decided to use the term anyway.
The Value Of Cloudfunding
Aside from coining the term, cloudfunding, we decided to engage in it because we believed it was a better way to deliver value — more flexibly and less expensively — to the claims managers and risk managers who depend on our software to get their jobs done efficiently. We undertook the conversion of our old, on-premise claim product — IMS — for cloud delivery because we believed the cost savings, the increased productivity, the speed and efficiency, the performance, and the security would constitute valuable assets to our customers. We haven’t heard anything yet to suggest we were wrong.
We also think there’s value in playfulness, in having fun, in engaging in a little word play to come up with a term like cloudfunding, and in deliberately making life a little lighter. We take our work seriously. We take our commitment to our customers — their business and their loyalty — very seriously. But we like to believe we don’t have to take ourselves seriously all the time.
One More Thought On Cloudfunding
We’re a product company. We develop and sell software. But we’re also a service company. We provide the services that enable our customers to get the most out of the software they buy from us. And we’ve come to realize we derive at least as much satisfaction from supporting and interacting with our customers as we do from developing software. If we were inclined to coin another term, we might call that interaction cloudsourcing.
But we don’t want to get ahead of ourselves.