When Kimberly Schultz first joined IDS in 2000, she found a business with a balance she valued: professional structure and a warm, people-first culture. Over more than two decades, Kimberly has built a career spanning customer support, implementation, and leadership. She has also helped guide the business through change, including its acquisition by Perseus Group […]
Category: Article
Rethinking MVPs in the Age of AI
There’s a version of MVP (Minimum Viable Product) development that hasn’t changed much in a decade: find a real customer problem, confirm there’s willingness to pay, and build the smallest solution that addresses it. Then, get it into customers’ hands quickly and see whether it delivers. Now, with AI compressing development timelines, teams can build […]
Coming Back to OptiVision: Pratheep Chidambaram on a New Chapter for a Business He Has Known for Decades
Pratheep Chidambaram began working with the OptiVision product in 1993 and went on to spend 23 years at Honeywell, progressing through roles spanning project delivery, operations, and engineering. After more than two decades with Honeywell, Pratheep stepped away to pursue independent consulting. Shortly thereafter, news broke that OptiVision would be carved out of Honeywell and […]
Sean Raynor: Three Decades of Leadership in Dealer Software
Sean Raynor didn’t plan on a career in dealership software, he more or less stumbled into it. Shortly after college, his roommate started selling boats at a dealership that had recently purchased a new ERP system. Their team wasn’t entirely sure how to use it, so Sean spent three months helping them figure it out. […]
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How QA Teams are Using AI to Rethink Testing
At a recent Perseus AI Roundtable, Sadia Aslam shared how her QA team has transformed their approach to software testing with Cursor. Over the past year, they’ve produced a framework that helps QA engineers build, maintain, execute, and troubleshoot automated tests more efficiently. In this article, Sadia shares how the team approached adoption, the lessons […]
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How One Marketing Leader Reimagined Her Team With AI
A Conversation with Raginee Mamgain, Director of Marketing, Constellation Dealer Group. Artificial intelligence has become a fixture in marketing conversations, but for most teams, its use remains limited to drafting emails or brainstorming ideas. Raginee Mamgain has taken a different approach. When her content manager resigned several months ago, she saw an opportunity to rethink […]
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Consolidation of Dealer Software is Underway: What Does That Mean for Independent Operators?
For decades, the dealer software market has been built by entrepreneurs. Many of the systems that dealerships rely on today, whether for dealer management, inventory, F&I, fixed operations, CRM, digital retailing, payments, or analytics, began as businesses founded by people who deeply understood the industry and built software to solve very specific problems. That entrepreneurial […]
Perseus Group: H1 2026 in Review
The first half of 2026 has kept us busy across the group. We welcomed two new businesses to our portfolio, hit to road to meet founders around the world, and leaned into AI. Here’s a look back at the first six months of the year! Acquisitions Completed We completed two acquisitions in the first half of the year, expanding our footprint in dealership software. […]
Women in Technology: Finding Your Voice and Creating Your Own Opportunities
When Divya Lucas joined Aspen three years ago, she wasn’t stepping into a carefully planned technology career. In fact, her path into software began almost by accident. After spending a decade in the automotive industry working with dealer management systems and CRM software, Divya was approached about an opportunity that would eventually lead her to Aspen. What started as a customer success role quickly […]
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The Case for Selling: How an Exit Can Give a Founder Back Their Focus
For many entrepreneurs, building a business begins with a passion for the work itself. However, as the business grows, the work you once loved gets buried under the work that simply has to get done. A CIBC survey of more than 1,000 small business owners found that two-thirds work longer hours than they did as employees, and […]
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Inside the Process: A Firsthand Account of Selling a Business
In the first article in this series, Adam Zimmer shared lessons from the founder’s perspective, emphasizing that the smoothest sale processes are rarely built in the months leading up to a transaction. To complement that perspective, we spoke with Aaran Newman, Managing Director of Auto-IT, who, in conjunction with his partners, recently guided the business through its own sale […]
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Running the Business You Depend On: The Customer-Owner Dilemma
Customer-owned software businesses have very different priorities than traditional founder-owned companies when they begin thinking about a sale. The customers who own the software are usually operators first. They built or acquired the platform to solve a critical operational problem inside their industry, not because they aspired to run a software company indefinitely. At a certain point, many customer-owned businesses […]
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