The original impetus for the idea came when Hickey's wife's business was expanding too quickly and could no longer service customers with spreadsheets.

"The single largest point of differentiation is that e-commerce is about products -- except for our software," he said. "You can mold in services and products -- like book a tennis court and buy a set of tennis balls in the same transaction."

OsCommRes features an API (application programming interface) to allow third-party plug-ins, integration with the Typo3 CMS (content management system) to allow access to digital resources via subscription, and automated marketing with SMS, he said. Some 30 different reports can be generated and the call center function allows businesses to copes with phone sales.

"It doesn't have a CRM link yet, but we're about to integrate with SugarCRM so people can purchase via Sugar," Hickey said. "It's built on LAMP [Linux Apache MySQL PHP] and it is moving to MySQL and PHP 5 because we want to bring in stored procedures."

Hickey said the company decided to do something difficult and time-consuming, but it can now see the payoff.