This is the fifth of five business features highlighting Saskatchewan companies that are finalists in the Saskatchewan Trade & Export Partnership’s (STEP) 2018 Exporter of the Year Award.
When you think about innovative North American software companies and where they are located, you might be more inclined to think Silicon Valley than central Saskatchewan.
But Vendasta Technologies has proven that you don’t need to move south of the border to California to succeed as a global software and technology company.
Headquartered in Saskatoon, Vendasta has grown from a prairie-based start-up with seven partners in 2008 to a company with more than 250 employees, 1,100 marketing partners and customers around the globe.
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Vendasta builds web-based platforms for selling digital business solutions to companies at home and abroad.
Through channel partners, which are companies that already sell digital software solutions to businesses, Vendasta’s software products are now being used by more than a million companies around the world, said company co-founder and Saskatoon resident Jeff Tomlin.
Thanks to a rapidly expanding customer base in the United States, Europe, Australia and South Africa, Vendasta is one of five Saskatchewan companies competing for the Saskatchewan Trade & Export Partnership’s (STEP) 2018 Exporter of the Year Award.
“Today, we’re home to about 260 people in our Saskatoon office and we also have people working remotely in Seattle, in Florida and in Toronto,” Tomlin said.
“We’re over the moon with the growth that we’ve had over the years.… It’s been a tonne of work, but it’s a testament to the talented group that we’ve been able to put together.”
Tomlin said much of Vendasta’s success was the result of good vision.
The founding partners saw a transformational change in the way companies were doing business and they turned it into an opportunity.
Vendasta’s first big break came in 2008 when it landed a contract to build a proprietary software program for Ritchie Bros. Auctioneers.
At the time, Ritchie Bros. was using a paper-based system to compile its auction listings.
Staff members would go to the field, collect photos, gather specs and other information and send the information to Ritchie’s head office.
Vendasta developed an automated platform known as FAIM — Field Asset and Information Management — that allowed field staff to take pictures and enter digital data remotely using a specialized mobile device.
The platform revolutionized the way the Ritchie Bros. gathered information and prepared its auction listings.
“That was our very first project that got our company started back in the day,” Tomlin said.
Another one of Vendasta’s early successes was a software program that allowed companies to analyze and manage their online reputations.
“We saw that times were changing for businesses and that their reputations online were becoming more and more important,” Tomlin said.
“People were reading online reviews about businesses, and those reviews were driving buying decisions, so there was a huge need for a simple reputation management tool that allowed business owners to understand and respond to what people were saying about them online.”
Vendasta brought its reputation management program to the marketplace in 2010 and used the success of that product to develop new products and new client relationships.
From there, momentum grew and acceptance of Vendasta’s products has continued to increase.
“We’ve got a lot of smart people here in Saskatchewan,” Tomlin said.
“We were one of the first (Saskatoon-based software) … companies to grow to a size like this, but when I look around now, there’s lots of successful start-ups that are taking off.…
“We are an agriculture-driven economy, but there’s some amazing diversification that’s going on in this province. Saskatoon and Saskatchewan are becoming a bit of a technology hub now, and it’s great to see.”
