"Eating your own dog food,” also called “dogfooding,” is a slang term used to define a scenario in which a company (usually, a software company) uses its own product to demonstrate the quality and capabilities of the product.
This is the definition provided by the free, non-profit web encyclopedia, Wikipedia, self-proclaimed as the “#5 website in the world, serving 482 million people every month.
And here at xTuple, we could not agree more. In fact, our company’s own internal database is lovingly called “dogfood.” And we eat it — or more accurately — utilize it every day to run our business. That’s right: our entire business management is run on our own software, i.e., our accounting, our corporate/customer relationship management (CRM) and our enterprise resource planning (ERP). From product development to customer support to product launches, marketing and sales. Just imagine.
Our Sales and Marketing group makes daily use of the CRM functionality to support our own internal Sales Process. We leverage the xTuple Web Portal integration and bring prospective customers that inquire on the website directly into the Contact database. Our inside sales team acts upon direct requests, using Activities to follow up and stay in touch with prospective customers. When prospective customers are ready to speak directly to an xTuple representative, we’ll work with our xTuple Partners and connect them with the best resource for their needs.
Customers and Partners then interact with xTuple’s support team via the xTuple Support Portal and Incident Management, for the xTuple Support Process. As Customers and Partners call-in or log issues via the Web, Incident Management is used to classify, categorize and assign issues. Activities are used in support, as well, to leverage the appropriate resources to respond to customer and partner requests. The "owner" of the issue can monitor the status of their issue using the same Support Portal.
For more on “eating your own dogfood”: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eating_your_own_dog_food
Wally Tonra
Wally has been with xTuple since 2004 and in ERP sales since the mid-1990s. After all that time selling vendor-centric, proprietary enterprise software, moving to an open source, Mac-friendly ERP package was a natural evolution. Prior to xTuple, Wally spent 10 years at JD Edwards, which was eventually acquired by Peoplesoft, in various sales and sales management positions. He made the move to xTuple before Oracle took over both Peoplesoft and the former JDE. Prior to JD Edwards, Wally held sales positions at ERP software company Daly.commerce (formerly Daly and Wolcott), hardware supplier XL/Datacomp and storage vendor EMC. Wally holds a B.S. from Boston College, where the Mac fanaticism all began.