Comment by skulle16 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by skulle16 | Hacker News Reader

Hey HN, I’m Colum, a co-founder of Genuity (https://www.gogenuity.com) - a SaaS platform for companies to manage IT: things like keeping track of laptops, managing employee support requests, and buying software at wholesale prices. We are trying to solve two major problems: (1) there is no QuickBooks of IT - most IT solutions are costly, hard-to-use enterprise offerings; and (2) lower volume = higher prices. We believe we can fix (1) with better software and (2) with a marketplace with collective buying power - effectively building a community that grows stronger together.

At my previous company we paid full price for all our software, not realizing that larger companies were able to get 50% discounts. We didn’t have a central system to track everything like our assets, contracts, vendor licenses, and support requests. We even had a seven-figure contract auto-renew for a service we were migrating away from because nobody tracked it. Painful!

We have a unique business model designed to align our interests with customers: we charge $29 per company monthly and a small % on all transactions in our marketplace. This means if we can’t save companies money, we won’t make any.

We’d love to hear your feedback and would be thrilled if you would sign up at https://secure.gogenuity.com/users/sign_up/about_you and try it and let us know what you think!

How can one tell how much is being saved through your service compared to contracting directly with a SaaS (Box, Okta, for example.) keeping in mind, that rarely are list prices what small companies pay to begin with, though admittedly, larger companies can get bigger discounts.

When technical issues come up, does one get support directly from the vendor; if not, how does that work?

Thanks for taking a look and great questions. The premise of Genuity is smaller customers can get better pricing together by bundling lower demand into a single delivery system. Typically, smaller companies are harder to reach and service with a direct salesforce and are typically services by resellers and VARs like CDW. We believe our model lowers costs for customers but also the vendors by cutting the fat out of the system using software. As an example, we are running a promotion on MSFT and save customers 15% versus what is on their site. In the future we are also thinking of allowing customers to share what they are paying as well.

Also, today in our marketplace we integrate these apps directly for billing, provision, etc. so we handle all the support elements.

Genuity was a data-center operator in Arizona; it was purchased by GTE, then used as the name for the network operating company which was later sold by Verizon to Level3. L3 was bought by CenturyLink, now part of Lumen.

I suspect Lumen still owns the Genuity trademark for network related activities, and IT management is rather close to that.

Great memory. When GTE merged with Bell Atlantic to form Verizon, they had to spin out their Internet assets which became Genuity. Genuity was a large publicly traded ISP but ultimately went Ch 11 when Verizon did not buy them. Level 3 bought their assets, Qwest (now Lumen) bought Level 3 .

We always liked the name and did check on the mark.

Qwest became Centurylink then Lumen :).

It's not really a great memory if you were working for one or more of them -- and I was.

Very cool and you would know. Lots of battle scars from that period in telecom.

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