The Applicator

David Dobrin first started working in the application space in 1990, when he was hired by QAD, Inc., to help the company improve its documentations. In the five years he spent working on QAD software, he ended up learning it pretty well. What’s astonishing, really, is how little difference there is between QAD’s version and other’s and how little the software has changed since then.

In 1995 or thereabouts, he joined Benchmarking Partners, where he rose to become the Chief Business Architect, whatever that means. In the process, he took a pretty good look at all the major ERP, supply chain, and, later, CRM software packages, none of which, again, have changed much since then.

After the dot-bomb, he got tired of the blackmail business (pay-to-play analyst work) and started his own boutique analyst firm, B2B Analysts, Inc., which virtuously and self-righteously made it a policy to take no money from application companies that it would cover. (Don’t tell anybody, but the companies weren’t exactly beating down his door trying to get him to take money.) B2B Analysts, Inc., has now been in business for 8 years and has been profitable every year. There aren’t actually that many application companies that can say as much.