Every company is shaped by its key decisions. Although we didn't always recognize their significance at the time we were making them, looking back, we believe these five big decisions made us who we are today.
 | 1998 | | Getting started
We began, as most young companies do, by forging a name for ourselves in a small, cramped office in Framingham, Mass. We accepted work from an eclectic mix of clients: banks, a trophy company, a candle maker and a woman who owned paintings by the artist Odd Nerdrum. |
| 2000 | | Finding focus
Despite a couple of relatively successful years as a Web boutique, we came to the conclusion that the key to success for us would require focus. We started to say "no" to others and made the very deliberate decision to build Web sites for schools. It quickly became clear we could leverage our collective experience and provide a better product and services to our clients by focusing. We used our close interaction with our clients to determine their needs and then built our solutions accordingly.
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| 2001 | | The hosted solution
As momentum built in the school market, it became clear that leveraging the Internet to deploy upgrades and maintain uptime of Web sites was the way to go. Early on, we'd allowed a few schools to host their own sites, but quickly learned that having control over the hosting environment would allow us to provide schools the accountability and reliability they desired. This decision freed schools from the headaches of compliance, security, performance and server infrastructure, and lowered the costs associated with launching and operating a Web site.
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| 2004 | | Targeted content and the birth of our Student Information System
As the demand for "behind-the-password" functionality began to rise, we shifted our focus to that potential. Tired of providing online communities incapable of meeting parents' needs for personalized, meaningful information, we set out to do better. We considered how recognition of user roles could shape information delivery, sparing them from scanning through news and announcements that had no effect on them. The idea of portals was just beginning to surface in conversation, and we recognized their adoption could add significant value and depth to school communications. But perhaps the biggest influence in the decision to use portals came when we decided to build a brand new Student Information System and naturally integrate it with our Content Management System. The belief was that this would provide our users with the wealth of timely, accurate data they desired.
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| 2007 | | The Ecosystem
By 2007, business was thriving and we had grown to almost 300 schools worldwide. Our staff grew, too. As we grew, it became increasingly important to make decisions about how we spend our time. We struggled to define where our product stopped and others began. We had read about big companies, like salesforce.com, who were building out their own "Ecosystems." By transitioning our product to a service-oriented architecture (SOA), we could provide the platform on top of which other companies could deploy their products. First, we released an API to Podium in the summer of 2007. Then, we invited companies we respected and whose products were already being used by many of our clients to become a part of our Ecosystem. We asked them to
sign partnership agreements. We committed time and staff to finding
ways to exchange information between Podium and their products. Today,
our Ecosystem is flourishing. Competing products coexist alongside each
other because we think our schools should be able to choose the
solutions that work best for them.
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