Wayside Technology’s Virtual Key Warehouse Wins Industry Award

In May 2014, Wayside Technology Group (Shrewsbury) won accolades from SmartCEO magazine for a business-process innovation the company had developed. Wayside won the magazine’s 2014 Voltage Award in the Large Technology Implementer category.

Wayside has developed what it calls the Virtual Key Warehouse for use by its Lifeboat Distribution value-added software subsidiary. The system –a virtual repository for software keys – lets Lifeboat’s vendor partners speed up and simplify their software’s distribution to end user customers. All the development work was done in-house by the company’s IT team.

Wayside, founded in 1982, is a unified, integrated technology company providing computing products and solutions to corporate IT organizations, government agencies an educational institutions through resellers. The company offers technology products from software publishers and manufacturers such as Intel, Dell Software, Sophos and Veeam.

NJTechWeekly.com spoke with Vito Legrottaglie, Wayside’s vice president of operations and information systems, who led the team that had developed the Virtual Key Warehouse.

Legrottaglie told us the company had devised the solution for customer service reasons. “We wanted to provide great service to our vendors,” he said.

Added Simon Nynens, CEO, the Virtual Key Warehouse had helped the company gain a competitive advantage and build enduring relationships with its software vendor partners.

Before the system was developed, the process for distributing and authorizing software was inefficient and cumbersome. A reseller would place a customer order for a particular software product through Lifeboat. The order would be sent to the software manufacturer. The manufacturer would create a unique software code that would authorize the use of the software (called a product key) and send it to the end user customer via a download link.

The lead time for those orders often took several hours to several days. “Manufacturers are great at creating software, but they are not really good at getting it to their end user customers,” Legrottaglie said.

Wayside then learned that some of its manufacturers could create software product keys in bulk. The company decided to devise a way to purchase the keys in bulk, hold them securely and distribute them directly to the customer.

“If we were able to acquire those keys in bulk and store them securely, then when an order came through we wouldn’t have to send it to the manufacturer. We could automatically send the key out to the end user through our system,” Legrottaglie said.

After the Virtual Key Warehouse was implemented, turnaround time went from several days to anywhere from 10 minutes to an hour. “Not only were customers getting their orders quicker, the manufacturers were processing fewer orders. Instead of processing orders one at a time, they were processing bulk orders for 1,000 units,” said Legrottaglie.

“The efficiencies on the manufacturers’ side were dramatic because they have to send many fewer orders than [they would] if they had to send everything separately,” he noted.

In addition, the company is able to send the manufacturers electronic data weekly or monthly so they know exactly which end users are receiving their software.

Legrottaglie said his team had created efficiencies on both sides of the process. Wayside is now able to process orders immediately, and all confirmations are immediate. There is no need for anyone to touch an order once it has been placed, he said.

“We’ve created a lot of security in the system. If there is a question about a particular key code, we have a complete audit trail of everything that happened with that code … There are no concerns about codes being sent out erroneously,” he added.