"We were an extremely siloed organization," she said. "People didn't feel like they were in the loop. Also, salespeople were e-mailing PDFs of spreadsheets to each other. That led to the problem of dueling versions." Now, "rather than manage 10 million spreadsheets, I can have a single source of truth that I can then disseminate everywhere," she said. Workflow has improved so much, Walsh said, that "people grab me in the hallway and literally hug and tell me that QuickBase has changed their life."

Other divisions at Genworth, a 7,000-employee financial services provider in Richmond, Va., that was spun out of General Electric Co. in 2004, are considering moving to QuickBase, Walsh said.

Mark Shnier, vice president of customer service and logistics at G.E. Shnier Co., a US$150 million-a-year Toronto-based wholesaler of carpet and tile, said nontechnical users like himself can now create dynamic forms using QuickBase that add or delete questions and fields depending on respondents' answers.

"I don't know Javascript or HTML. I'd say I'm about a B+ level user of Excel. But I can develop applications pretty quickly with QuickBase," said Shnier.

The company integrates data from its central ERP system into QuickBase. It also uses the software to centrally host important documents that are accessible by 200 employees.