CitySourced Merges with Rock Solid Technologies

I’m excited to announce that CitySourced is merging with Rock Solid Technologies. Founded in 1997, Rock Solid Technologies is the creator behind RESPOND©a citizen services 311 and CRM software, used by governments throughout North America, Puerto Rico, and Panama.

Early Days

It’s hard to believe that nearly eleven years ago I began working on a side project that would ultimately become CitySourced. I definitely have more gray hairs than I did back then.

After hacking out a proof of concept on my own, I eventually grew a team that began working full time out of my garage in Los Angeles. I built the first version of our CitySourced mobile app in 2009 to solve my own problem. I needed to report a problem outside my home, I didn’t know who to call, and I knew there had to be a better way. This was right at the time the iPhone launched and, upon seeing what the smartphone could do, all the pieces came together and just clicked. I showed my alpha product to a friend at a DigeratiLA event, and he helped to put me on stage on TechCrunch 50. This milestone helped secure our first local government customer.

 

Rock Solid Presenting at TechCrunch50 Presenting at TechCrunch50 in 2009

 

Our app started out simply snapping a photo of the problem, say graffiti or potholes, and has now grown into a complete mobile app platform that connects residents with their local government. As we continued to innovate on the citizen side of service request submission, we kept hearing from customers that they needed better ways to manage their inbound requests.

At first, we started with simple email notifications. This quickly grew to provide custom workflows, GIS integration with Esri, and eventually into a best-of-breed service request solution with bi-directional integrations into dozens of the leading back office software tools governments use on a daily basis.

Growth of Local Government CRM

Local government adoption of CRM is growing, and our customers continually provide feedback that they'd like to see more CRM features. We considered putting our own resources to task building out these features ourselves, but the opportunity to partner with Rock Solid came at a very opportune moment. Rock Solid's CRM product RESPOND© is built on top of Microsoft’s Dynamic CRM platform, a world-class CRM considered to be best-breed. Given CitySourced and Rock Solid are leaders in their respective spaces, we felt a merger of our technologies would create a product unlike anything in our market. Our product combination of citizen-facing mobile apps and a back office CRM is the most complete offering available to local governments today.

Honolulu 311 Mobile citizen engagement app

Why now?

Growing a successful software company, I constantly receive a steady stream of inbound requests for raising capital, merging, or selling my business. Most of these offers didn’t interest me. With Rock Solid, however, the opportunity was just too compelling.

As I discussed above our products are incredibly complementary. We wanted enhanced CRM functionality. They wanted to offer broader native app capabilities for their customers’ residents. Rock Solid is built on Microsoft technologies and products. CitySourced is built on the Microsoft .NET stack.

Together, we now have products and enhancements that we’ve wanted to build and our combined teams now have over 140 employees, including a strong engineering team of almost 60 software engineers.

Lastly, and most importantly, our team instantly connected with the leadership at Rock Solid. They are led by engineers, with whom I easily relate, and they put a high value on the expertise of our existing team. Honestly, when Rock Solid's CEO Rick Brown told me his origin story, there were a lot of parallels to my path in life. For me personally, it just clicked.

What this means for Customers

First, Rock Solid will continue to support and service our CitySourced products! Second, it was really important for me to keep our team in place and I’m proud that all CitySourced employees will continue in ongoing roles.

You can check out our support page for more details.

Get more information on our new upcoming CRM

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