Founded in 2005 by automotive and IT industry veterans, Skoots provides a unique, web-based service for auto dealers and their customers—all based on the Microsoft .NET Framework and other technologies, including Silverlight. Consumers can find the new or used vehicle they want, eNegotiate with a dealer in real time, and lock in a deal without having to ever leave their home or office.

Here is our conversation with Rob Barbour, CTO at Skoots.

Microsoft Startup Zone: Why and when did you first choose the Microsoft Platform?

Rob Barbour: That was actually one of the easiest decisions. With any startup, with any company of this nature, you have to choose technologies that are basically going to get you to market fast enough to capture your existing audience or an audience that you hope to capture. We chose everything Microsoft. It was .NET, SQL, IIS from the start. The real reason is basically bringing our product to market faster than we could have done with other technologies.

MSUZ: Can you quantify what advantage that decision gave you?

Barbour: We didn't do any development work on other technologies, so it's tough to quantify. However, I can tell you my personal experience over the years, it's 50 to 100 percent faster [using Microsoft] than doing it in with other technologies. What can be done, for example, in .NET would take you two or three times longer using other technologies. Without question—it’s much, much faster.

Just to give you an example, I’ve been working with Microsoft technologies since the 1980s. I started on Visual Basic when it was launched and with .NET at launch. Today, it’s a quantum leap how fast you can bring things to the consumer, to the desktop, to the web. It’s just amazing. So if you were to compare .NET up against something like PHP or Ruby—there’s no comparison. I can literally develop an application, a complete application that could run on any desktop in minutes.

MSUZ: So for the Skoots Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offering, your LIVEoffer and Accelerator product, you used the .NET Framework, Microsoft Visual Studio, Windows Enterprise Server, SQL Server 2005, and Internet Information Server 6.0. Any one technology that was most critical to your business model?

Barbour: .NET was key—our product is based on it. But more importantly, is the scalability and the speed at which SQL 2005 has really enabled our company to do some amazing things on the back-end. It’s been an amazing tool to use. I mean, I’ve been through all the versions of SQL, and SQL 2005 is really a great platform to work on and develop on. It’s really enabled us to deliver the data faster and actually do anything we need to do on the back-end. SQL is far faster than using other databases.

As an example, if we want to display data (our application uses grids and things like that overall), we have a lot of flexibility with .NET. We can drop a grid in, populate it, display data, and have those done in minutes. It takes longer to really develop a rich user friendly interface, but being able to literally create something that displays data in a grid format, for example, within minutes, where else can you do that?

MSUZ: Can you explain how this is critical to your data model?

Barbour: It’s a combination of the front-end and the back-end. On the front end, we’re using ASP.NET and some grid components to display the data that is being brought in from the SQL back-end. On the back-end, there were hundreds of stored procedures that were written to actually generate the displays. This is the data that is then used by the grids in other technologies on the front end, which is part of the reason we are going to be using Silverlight. When Silverlight 2.0 is released we’ll have the ability to display the database information within the Silverlight application with ease, and with a rich user experience. 

MSUZ: Can you elaborate on your use of Silverlight and how you think it will change the user experience?

Barbour: Since Silverlight 2.0 was just announced at the MIX conference, we’re going to gear everything toward that version. We think it’s an amazing interactive technology, and believe it will allow us to create some very unique ways for consumers, to not only view the data that we’ve already got on the back-end, but to a certain degree, to enable them to have some fun with the data we’re providing them. Silverlight will change how people interact with our Web site and what they’re able to do with it. Having already worked with Silverlight 1.0 in testing the waters, we’re just getting started with Silverlight 2.0, the beta release. In fact, we’re going to completely revamp the details page for a car—and that will really highlight Silverlight’s capabilities. Due to the fact that Silverlight is cross-platform, it will enable our application to work on a variety of desktops regardless of browser type. Eventually, we’ll revamp all areas of the consumer site so consumers have such a rich experience that they won’t want to go anywhere else to look for cars.

Other technologies we will use will include Server 2008, SQL 2008 and we’re already using Visual Studio 2008.

The bottom line with using these Microsoft technologies (.Net, SQL, Server 2003, etc.)—we wouldn’t have been able to bring the application to market as quickly if we chose to use other technologies. We’re truly looking forward to Silverlight 2.0 and to building an amazing and feature rich consumer experience for car buying. 
 

Rob Barbour's Background

Rob Barbour has more than a decade of experience in the technology field—and has worked in a variety of environments, and in more than 52 countries worldwide. As CTO of Skoots, he oversees all current and future technology development work. Prior to joining Skoots, he worked for a variety of start-ups in executive roles, honing his entrepreneurial and creative skills. In 2002, he formed his first company and still runs it today. Before that, he leveraged his knowledge of Banyan and Microsoft, and began consulting independently, and within various organizations. He began his career in the networking industry, with an interest in Banyan, which at the time was one of the largest server systems. He worked in that environment for several years and eventually led several of the teams he was part of. His focus shifted to Microsoft technologies as the use of Banyan technologies began to subside. He also began to focus on programming and acquiring domain names. Many years ago, he had the vision to see the value in domains and currently owns an extremely large portfolio of domain names and associated Web sites.

For more information on Skoots, read the success story, “Skoots Drives Sales to Online Auto Dealers."