1988

OutreachSystems was born back in December 1988 when it was called Softshare. Softshare started off as a company distributing the Commerce Business Daily (CBD) bid opportunities via the mail, and we were doing work for hire. Our first client was our own parent company, MCR, who was a federal contractor for the Department of Transportation. MCR was seeking rapid and efficient access to new bid opportunities, long before the internet existed. Once we proved our success internally, we found other large government contractors needing access to federal bid opportunities.

1990

The South Carolina, Kentucky, and Missouri Procurement Technical Assistance Centers (PTACs), also heard about our success and felt that this was a great system for small businesses. However, these federally funded programs needed more than just bid distribution services, they also needed a system to organize and track the success of their clients. These three programs were instrumental in the early days to help us conceive a system designed for and by PTACs. CATS was born – the Client Activity Tracking System. This first iteration of CATS was DOS-based.

1995

In 1995, our market share had grown to dozens of economic development organizations across the country, including the Illinois Department of Commerce, the Pennsylvania Small Business Development Centers, George Mason University and many more. To meet this new sophisticated and diverse community, we developed WinCATS, a Windows-based version of the CRM system.

2008

We continued to keep pace with technology by developing our first web-based version, WebCATS, to meet our growing customer base of economic development organizations not just in the United States, but also in Central and South America. The eCenter Direct client portal was born to help minimize data entry and streamline operations.

2012

In 2012, briefly we had NeoCATS which was quickly renamed to Neoserra. Our first bi-lingual version of the CRM to meet the growing needs of our South American customers.

Today

Over the years we have made the product better in a thousand ways. We’ve released hundreds of major updates, and thousands of minor ones. From humble beginnings, OutreachSystems has grown into a major force — the most prominent CRM system for economic development organizations serving an alphabet soup of organizations from PTACs to SBDCs, WBCs, VBOCs, MBDAs and a whole host of EDCs. Our clients are no longer limited to the United States, we also offer the premier CRM system for economic development organizations in the Caribbean, Central and South America and we are expanding into Africa.

Thousands of small businesses continue to rely on OutreachSystems for their daily bid matches, and economic development counselors rely on Neoserra to help them keep track of the impact they have on their local communities.