It is a crowded space. The Zudy VINYL platform has led the way in this space. When I compare it to other solutions, there are probably two things that stand out in my mind about why I am always drawn back to the Zudy partnership. Their ability to connect to just about any data source is huge. If you have a platform that can't connect to things, it really limits the usage of that particular platform. The managed services that you can leverage from Zudy are huge as well. A lot of times when you're standing these things up, you need support, strong BAs, and other things. It takes awhile to get adoption, if you think your team is just going to pick up a new platform, leverage it, and be really good at it. A lot of times, the inability to deliver something quickly will tend to make people not use it the next time.

The biggest benefit of the VINYL platform: There are a lot of low-code development tools out there, but VINYL has the ability to connect to just about any data source out there, if an API exists for it and can be leveraged. We have even partnered with them at times to work with third-party vendors to develop APIs on our own, if there wasn't an API that exists for it.

It is huge. Between UI improvements, the ability to connect to other data sources, or the ability to deploy truly mobile apps, it is that type of functionality that continues to keep the product relevant, especially in a relatively crowded space. There are a lot of people who try to use low-code development platforms, but the VINYL platform is very robust. When you combine that with the managed services that they offer and their continued development of the platform, it really makes them stand out.

It is probably close to 60% to 70% that you can deliver things quicker than you could with more traditional development frameworks or even low-code development frameworks, because there isn't really a limitation in terms of the number of tools or systems that VINYL can integrate with. You are not really limited. You don't need to find another solution or work out different integration capabilities when you're dealing with the VINYL platform. You are just limited more by your imagination than you are by any of the technical capabilities of the system.

We did look into some other options but decided to go with Zudy because of its development speed and proof of concept offering.

The Zudy VINYL platform is the primary solution that we evaluated for workflow automation. Once we brought the system and platform in-house, we found that we were able to use it for additional business needs where we might have otherwise gone out to market to look at commercial off-the-shelf systems for particular business needs that are not workflow oriented.

I haven't gone out to the market to look at a lot of competitors, but I can't imagine that any of them are going to blow my expectations away the way that the VINYL platform has.

We had a national RFP, which Zudy VINYL won.

The main differences between Zudy and the competition were really about customization, integration, and customer service. Those were the three boxes. We needed something specific to us. We do things differently than other companies. We needed something that could integrate with our other systems—some very big, popular ones that a lot of businesses use—and some that were custom-built just for Entercom. And we needed some strong customer support, since this was our first go-round in this particular platform. They delivered on all three. It was pretty obvious.

We looked at OutSystems. There were a couple of other tools out there that we looked at.

As a Finance person, all I can say is anecdotally what I've heard from the IT people. Overall, we're happy with the tool. I have not had people come to me and say we should drop this and do something else. But I couldn't really comment deeply on how it compares to the competition. All I know is that we're happy with what we have.

We evaluated numerous alternatives, including Google, Microsoft, Caspio, and Quickbase. We chose Vinyl for several reasons, including the willingness to provide an application-specific demo. It had great pricing, and the sales and engineering team was there on day one.

We looked at numerous other applications from some of the larger software providers. Because we have 6,000 users, all of the other applications and tools got very expensive from a licensing standpoint. An additional issue was that the other applications, from a data standpoint, needed to create another data store and co-locate all of the data. That was another drawback. We did do several other proofs of concept with larger players, but our needs were not going to be met by them in a cost-effective way.

I have not seen a tool that is really on this level. There may be a lot of other tools that do parts of what this tool does, or there might be tools that do all of it, but the time to value and the time to implement is much longer, and it's a more complex implementation. To me, speed and simplicity are really the two biggest things that VINYL has in terms of a leg up on the competition.

I was not employed with my current company during this decision-making process.

We looked at a couple of no-code-only options. The big one that we looked at was the Microsoft offering called Microsoft Flow.

One of the things we really enjoy about the VINYL offering is that it's on-prem. That really works with the way our company is architected.

We just did an internet search of some products that were on other platforms and what they came along with. What jumped out to us was we had the ability to own everything that we built, of course with the support and help from Zudy. 

Without mentioning what those other platforms were, some of them are very prominent, that you hear about in the media every day. Although they were comparable, we found that we can do the same thing with the Zudy platform and the team, and they proved us right.

Our decision criteria were really based on opportunity and timelines, so I didn't have a lot of other people on our shortlist. OutSystems was one that I had had experience within the past, but their platform didn't really fit what we needed to do. I had some relationships with some folks at Zudy and the speed of trust happened; it didn't take us very long.

We were at the TechEd last year as a prospect. It was about a month after that we signed up, and eleven weeks later they delivered a proof of concept that our current ERP solution provider couldn't do in three years.

I did look at all of the rapid development options, like Zoho. I liked my interface with the business team at Zudy well enough that I didn't look at anybody else because they seem to know what they are doing.

We looked at other middleware products but liked the unique capabilities of this one.

As far as connectivity and ease of use, nobody else was doing anything better.

We weren't sold on VINYL in the beginning. It was brought in, it was used for something, a proof of concept, but it wasn't really utilized to its full potential.

I went to the TechEd conference last year and I saw what it could do by seeing all the other customers and that's when we really started adapting it. I came back to the office and I said, "I see you use cases that I never would have seen if I hadn't seen the other solutions in place." So, I think the TechEd is our turning point where we started really utilizing it.

We did not evaluate other options for the purposes we intend to use VINYL for. 

I did evaluate other competitors.

We did look at other options but they don't have the flexibility that this does. This has a lot of flexibility.