The Orchid Story

(Orchid Connects)

A Short History

We began as an intention to optimize website creation and management. We called ourselves Orchid Suites which remains our legal name. (The "suites" comes from the ability to create suites of websites. We changed it to Orchid because of calls for beds.)

Our focus was in the non-profit and association space as a content management system - specifically for federated organizations. It was a modest goal. We'd been building simple content solutions for small organizations for many years and it seemed inefficient to rebuild them over and over. So we set out to productize what we'd been servicing for a decade.

We accomplished the product part first with Orchid for Change, pre-configured web solutions for progressive political parties that created a network of connected sites across the country. But demand grew in every way -- especially in that organizations, as opposed to businesses, have very complex and unforgiving needs. When it comes to their web presence their needs touch on nearly every aspect of their businesses. Those needs and our willingness/obligation to help fulfill them lead us down a path of growing our software far beyond the bounds of simple content. As the sophistication of our software grew, our biggest challenge became managing complexity for smaller, less technical clients.

We added transaction processing, event management, a full featured store, blogs, forums, testing, curriculum... the list goes on and on. Our homegrown non-profit and political software evolved into a commercial software. Instead of being compared to Drupal and Joomla we started being mentioned in the same sentence as RedDot and SiteCore.

On the demand front, when we are approached for our content management system we find clients are also needed a permitting system, a donor management system, a store, event management, etc. The problem was too many features or not enough depth in a particular feature, or too much complexity or not enough complexity. We were stuck between a service and a developer platform. We were stuck between markets (the non-profit organizational world and the rest of it.) We were stuck between being part of an enterprise's external presence ( a challenging and sensitive place to be) and the backend core to their business.

This may seem like a complicated story, but we don't think it's unusual. We are young, organically founded and grown (we saw a need, had the skills, did it for a long time just to pay the bills), and we're in an industry (technology generally and web specifically) that is in a constant state of commodification. The fact of trending commodification, in fact, is what made it possible for us to be in business in the first place. We have learned to adapt to change.

For now, we believe we are in the right place. We remain focused on our original goals: to help organizations realize their dreams using technology that works for them. And because people, processes and systems are at the root of the matter, we believe OrchidCONNECT will meet those needs.