John Lim: There is not a lot of pushing going on in terms of our products. One of the nice things about this show is that it gives us a venue to really talk about some of the problems that the industry is facing today and some of the challenges that are in their way. All of the companies out there are trying to optimize what they're doing and manage risk to get more out of their investment. We're out there to really understand what their needs are. This year we have confirmed that we have done a good job of aligning to our clients' needs.

The topics that were covered focused on everything from data and knowledge management, to optimizing the relationships with their vendors, appraisers or investors. We offer the whole-scale, large-enterprise systems that help our clients optimize their operations, understand their investments and strategically align what they are doing with what their investors are wanting from them.

We could see that what we were doing from a knowledge-management, customer-relationship management, transaction-management and financial analytics was very much in line with the industry's needs. This show helps us to test that and confirm that we are on the right track. We obviously have a lot of friends at this show that have been working with us for a very long time. So it also becomes a venue to get new ideas and connect with our client base.

In that respect, we have three new product families, the knowledge management, the CRM (or the transaction-management family) and the analytics family. The way we've organized our company today seems to work very well with our clients' needs. There are new product lines coming out from each of those product families, and they're really resonating with the market. It was a very good show for us to get confirmation on the things we were doing right.

GlobeSt.com: Was there anything you took away from the conference that might help you strategically shape the business going forward?

Demetrios Louziotis: If anything, the show validated what our strategy is from an overall holistic-product framework. We now are looking at three product families leveraging our core competency to expand and provide more solutions based on those core competencies to help our clients do what they need to do better. Ours is an ecosystem approach as opposed to an integrated approach. It's an open platform with modularity where you can choose what you need and not have to take things that you don't need. You have the ability to work with other systems and bring data and functionality in. An example is us partnering with someone like eFront, giving the ability to link our solution to another solution that our clients need to use is the right strategy. That was enforced by a lot of the discussions we had at Realcomm and by the feedback we got from the sessions we participated in.

The other side of that is that the market is ready to get to the next phase of where the industry is going and is looking for the systems to help do that. We started seeing this about a year or so ago in Asia where there was a replacement cycle starting. But it's not just a replacement cycle, it's a replacement and upgrade cycle where the business has evolved. That's one of the themes we've focused on in the past few years – looking at the industry as it has evolved from a local business, to a global, institutionalized asset class that competes with other asset classes, whether it be stocks, bonds or forms of private equity to compete for capital. It needs to have the tools available to operate like those asset classes. If anything has changed in terms of what we are trying to do with the individual products, it has motivated us to accelerate what we are doing as much as we can. There are obviously limitations to that, but when you look at ARGUS Enterprise, we're in discussions now to move some functions forward and anticipate bringing it a little further out around portfolio management. If you look at the Knowledge Vault, that is a platform. But there are things we can do with that platform to create functionality for segments of the industry that we think we can standardize with a tool -- rather than them having to start over with a blank sheet of paper -- and do what they want and further accelerate the time to value. We're on the right track. We just want to be able to do more, faster, to get them what they need and telling us that they want to see.

GlobeSt.com: Did people attending seem upbeat about the economy?

Caswell: The mood has been steadily improving. We know there are continued threats to the global economy, but there is also a tremendous well of strength. In commercial real estate, we had a lot of things go right. At the same time, a number of things in the larger economy went terribly wrong. This has allowed commercial real estate to dig out steadily and slowly. Fears about the pending CMBS refinance will be offset by historically low overall debt costs, and the variety of debt vehicles available to those who are well positioned with the right product and the right people and the right strategy. For those who are not, there are plenty of others who are ready and able to come in and benefit from their demise.

Overall, it is a critical time for people to be poised with the right tools to implement their specific strategy. They need to be able to navigate the vast array of competing and often conflicting data points and apply the macro to the micro. It's for this reason that ARGUS Knowledge Vault, complemented by our ARGUS Enterprise and other discounted cash-flow tools, help people discern the true course for the myriad confusing, disconnected internal and external inputs.

GlobeSt.com: Were most of the people you spoke with representative of a certain commercial real estate sector?

Lim: It was across the board. Of course, multifamily in North America is big. We see a lot of very good development emerging South of the border. All of those things are real positive signs.

Our solutions run across the different property types. What we saw were specific issues. In our world today there is probably more data flowing around this industry than there has ever been before. Trying to swim through all of that data and make sense of it is one of those challenges that we focused on in the last year. We have solutions like Knowledge Vault that is helping to make that data more accessible and consumable. Data becomes a real usable asset for them . One of the challenges that we see in our clients is that they have a lot of assets, investments, great people, data and great systems in place. But they're all kind of disjointed and don't work together. The right hand doesn't know what the left hand has and vice versa. We see so much of that. Our Knowledge Vault and CRM solutions bring together processes and data within an organization. They even connect vendors. Even that process of getting valuation work done from third parties is a very complicated process that we're helping to facilitate and make easier and optimized. These companies aren't being able to leverage all that they have and make it optimized and valuable within the organization. That's been our focus in the last two years – helping our clients make all of their assets valuable to the organization.

GlobeSt.com: Were there any new problems that firms asked you to solve that you weren't presented with in the past?

Louziotis: The two days there validated that our strategy, for what we do, is pretty much on track. The continued evolution of our cash flow and asset management into the ARGUS Enterprise platform is what people are looking for. Certainly being able to do a discounted cash flow is critical, but the industry is looking at that as a foundation for doing a lot more now. The capabilities we're bringing in to Enterprise are what they are looking for with regard to a valuation, cash-flow analysis and asset-management tool.

In terms of Knowledge Vault, there was tremendous interest. We were fortunate enough to have Brandon Henderson with Colliers International talking about that solution and the success that they've had. We have a range of clients that are using that solution now and are in the process of implementing it, all for different purposes. It really proves the flexibility of that platform, and as people hear about it and see more if it, it's validation that it's the right tool at the right time for folks. We understand pretty well the problems the industry is trying to solve today with technology, and for our space in that market, we got good feedback that what we're doing is right down the center of the plate.