After traveling back to Minnesota today from Arizona, it’s taking some getting used to the two hour time difference. Last night at this time I was just headed back to my hotel room after rocking out at a blackjack table with some funny money with Bob Clark from Axway PSO, Michael Rosen from Chase, and a bunch of other awesome folks at the Axway Customer appreciation dinner.

I was doing some searching and came across an Axway Connections blog at http://axwaytechnology08.blogspot.com/2008/10/creating-ecosystem-little-b2b-can-buy.html and found a comment from somebody responding to Dave Bennett, Axway’s CTO, expressing his desire for a web 2.0 style Axway User site. Well ha! I’m on it!!! And whatever it takes, I’m going to make this thing work! I touched up the design a bit and started working on components and layout for what will become the http://www.axwayuser.com site. You can see it at http://www.helpwithaxway.com/index.php, and I’ve love to hear your thoughts.

I heard it dozens of times from people of different companies -  The users need a site that they control, and where they’re heard. I wasn’t crazy when I started this initiative! Woo-hoo! Enough tooting my own horn though and promising things that I’m going to have to work around the clock to deliver, I should tell you a little bit more about the 2008 Connections Conference. Specifically, I’ll fill you in on one of my favorite breakout sessions for the Financial Services vertical.

Terry Johnson from Wells Fargo gave a case study presentation that provided a lot of great insight on making a relationship with Axway work. Wells Fargo is deploying practically every piece of the Synchrony suite of software from Axway, and is also a Tumbleweed customer - with plans to convert the trading partners on Tumbleweed to Synchrony. Now obviously Wells Fargo is a big company, and with the upcoming buyout of Wachovia, is positioned as not just a market leader - but an innovator as well. As such, listening to what the big guys at Wells Fargo say when it comes to Axway seems like a valuable thing to do!

The most important thing I took from Terry’s presentation was that when you approach the relationship with Axway as your vendor, you need to approach it as a partnership. Being so big, Wells definitely has some advantages over smaller companies when it comes to having “pull” with Axway, but by following some of the same steps Wells did, I’m confident companies like MoneyGram (where I consult), and others using the Synchrony suite can be heard. Terry mentioned that from the get-go, executives at Wells Fargo started talking to executives at Axway. When there was an immediate business need, Terry and his colleagues and employees didn’t wait for CABs or call support or PSO to get things going - they had FRANK and OPEN discussion. They explained the needs, they made excellent business cases for features and functionality, and they helped Axway bring these things to fruition.

Terry referenced something like 250,000+ lines of custom code that had all been heavily scrutinized by Wells. When PSO did introduce a piece of code or something custom (like all of our custom encryption/routing/ACH stuff at Moneygram in Integrator), they read through the code character by character, line-by-line, and made sure it was perfect. Essentially, they exercised extreme diligence that most of us aren’t willing to emulate. That’s really something to think about. Had MGI had access to the resources to scrutinize the customization as intensely as Wells Fargo is, the deployment could probably be more advanced, and the conversion project further along.

The moral of the story is, partner with Axway. Don’t just throw out demands and expect them to be met, set goals and work together to achieve them.

Until Next Time,

Tony