Aleks Ivanovic and the business of getting to yes

A supercomputer is an impressive thing to sell. Asking an engineer to help prepare every quotation is a less impressive way to sell it. In 2005, Cray had precisely that problem: a growing volume of proposals was putting pressure on its engineering resources. Aleks Ivanovic’s company, Webcom, offered an unusually practical answer. Give the salespeople software that could handle the configuration, pricing and proposal, and let the engineers get back to engineering.

There is a small comedy in the arrangement. A company capable of building a supercomputer still needed help getting a quotation out of the door. Ivanovic had found a useful place to work: the gap between what a business could make and how easily somebody could buy it.

That gap connects two rather different chapters of his career. Webcom served businesses selling complicated products. SpotHopper, which he later co-founded with his son, Niko, serves independent restaurants. The machinery changed. The problem of turning somebody’s interest into an actual sale remained familiar.

A Wisconsin address, by way of Sarajevo

Ivanovic was born in Sarajevo and finished high school there. In January 1988, he moved to Milwaukee to study. His uncle was already in the city, the only person he knew in America. A family connection gave the journey its destination.

He studied electrical engineering and graduated in 1993, then chose industry over an opportunity to stay at university. While employed, he began exploring the internet. Webcom followed in 1997, initially alongside his day job. He eventually left employment with his friend Milan Rajkovic to concentrate on the business.

The early operation helped companies get found through internet search. Ivanovic and his colleagues studied search engines and wrote software to examine their workings. Google’s arrival prompted a change in direction. His account of building Webcom included a modest starting investment of $1,000 and a willingness to revise the original plan.

The practical lesson he drew was about execution: ideas needed plans, work and corrections. Holding on to a plan after it stopped working was a poor bargain. In the company’s next phase, the opportunity lay deeper inside the customer’s sales process.

The engineering department would like its afternoon back

Webcom’s WebSource CPQ took its name from configure, price and quote. The words sound administrative until a customer wants a product with several options, sold through different channels, under different pricing rules. Then administration becomes the business. A quotation has to describe something the company can actually supply, at a price it can actually honor.

Cray’s selection of the software in October 2005 made that problem concrete. Its salespeople and channel partners needed to quote the XD1 system accurately without calling on engineering support. Webcom’s application could generate a quotation and proposal from a particular configuration. Sales staff could do more of the work themselves.

That was a specific ambition, and a useful one. Expensive technical expertise was being pulled into the preparation of sales documents. Putting the rules inside software offered a way to reduce that dependency. Even advanced computing had a paperwork problem.

A year earlier, Elliott Tool Technologies had selected WebSource CPQ for its own quotation process. Elliott made tube expanders, cleaners, pullers and related equipment. It wanted to help its sales partners serve customers and shorten the time needed to prepare quotes. Different products, similar friction.

For Ivanovic, speed and accuracy belonged together. A fast quotation with the wrong configuration only moves the trouble further down the line. Webcom’s appeal rested on making the transaction easier while keeping the details under control. That is an engineer’s sort of sales pitch: fewer obstacles, fewer opportunities for the process to go wrong.

“Our commitment to innovation is driven by our desire to drive business value to our clients.”

Aleks Ivanovic, 2005

In 2005, Webcom was selected for a Small Business Times IQ Award. The company’s customers then included Rockwell Automation, Danfoss, Corning Cable Systems and GE Industrial Systems. Recognition arrived attached to work with businesses that had substantial products to configure and distribute.

The customer kept adding to the job description

The product continued to acquire responsibilities. By May 2006, WebSource CPQ version 5.1 included a web services API, document content management, currency and market pricing tools, workflow history and analysis, and additional order management functions. A quotation sat inside a much longer chain of decisions and records.

Ivanovic called the release “the culmination of our client-driven approach.” The phrase is short; the feature list explains the labor behind it. Customers needed the software to work with their documents, their currencies, their approval processes and their existing customer relationship management systems. Each requirement made the original task less isolated.

PKWARE’s selection of WebSource CPQ that same year supplied another example. It wanted to streamline the path from sales opportunity to order, including work involving reseller partners. Integration with Salesforce.com mattered to its choice. The quotation tool had to participate in the rest of the selling operation.

The geography widened too. Webcom announced a European operation in 2004 to market and distribute WebSource CPQ across Europe, the Middle East and Africa, while recruiting resellers and solution partners. Ivanovic was building a sales channel as well as a piece of software. Getting the application into customers’ hands required its own configuration.

What Callidus bought

On October 3, 2011, Callidus Software acquired Webcom. The announcement followed the next day. Ivanovic signed the merger agreement as shareholder representative, an administrative title with rather more consequence than most.

The announced consideration was approximately $9.2 million in cash, with up to $1.75 million more tied to financial targets. Webcom brought approximately 120 SaaS customers. Its customer list included ABB, Technogym, Fuji Electric, Atlas Copco and NEC.

Callidus already sold sales performance management software. Webcom gave it tools for configuration, pricing and quoting, extending the work its platform could do for sales organizations. The buyer also saw an opportunity to sell products across the combined customer base.

Ivanovic’s stated ambition for the combination was broader customer reach. Webcom’s software could travel through a larger organization with international distribution and an established commitment to SaaS. The business he had started in Milwaukee had become part of somebody else’s product strategy.

There was also a continuing Serbian connection. Webcom had operations in Serbia when it was acquired. Years later, SpotHopper would again combine an American business with development and operations offices there. The connection survived the change in customers.

Then the customer became a restaurant

SpotHopper launched in 2015. Aleks and Niko Ivanovic were its co-founders; the father had already built and sold Webcom. This time, the customer might be a neighborhood restaurant trying to keep its website, promotions and incoming inquiries in order.

Niko brought an interest in craft beer and local food. Before SpotHopper, he had written about emerging craft breweries. The company’s origin story centers on independent producers whose work deserved a wider audience. Good products and public awareness did not always arrive together.

For Aleks, there was a recognizable commercial problem inside this new setting. A restaurant could produce something people wanted while still struggling with the work required to reach them online. Websites, messages, ordering and event inquiries created another set of tasks around the sale.

By November 2021, SpotHopper reported more than 3,000 restaurant customers across more than 30 states. Milwaukee customers included Story Hill BKC and Sobelman’s. The company’s first outside investment arrived that month: a $14 million Series A led by TVC Capital.

The platform combined restaurant website management with tools for catering, private parties, online ordering, email, social marketing and other tasks. The list reflected how many jobs could gather around one dining room. A restaurateur might finish the lunch service and discover an entirely separate shift waiting inside a browser.

Ivanovic described the goal as helping operators manage their online work in one place. Consolidation mattered. Every extra system required attention from people whose principal business was feeding guests.

More software, fewer separate chores

In June 2023, SpotHopper announced a further $12 million from TVC Capital, bringing its reported funding total to $26 million. The investment was intended to support its teams and expand autonomous sales and marketing tools, including generative AI capabilities.

Technology had supplied a new vocabulary, but the commercial question remained quite plain. Could a restaurant get more useful work done without giving its owner another collection of systems to supervise? The company's plan placed automation around the daily business of attracting and responding to customers.

Today, Ivanovic is chairman and founder of SpotHopper, while Niko is its CEO. His public testimonial for Channel Equity Partners singles out help with SaaS reporting, investor introductions and the Series B raise. After years spent making customers’ commercial processes work better, he was describing the systems and relationships behind his own company’s financing.

Seen together, the two businesses give his career a particular shape. Webcom put complicated product rules within a salesperson’s reach. SpotHopper brought a collection of online jobs into a restaurant platform. Both asked software to take on work that otherwise demanded repeated human attention.

A supercomputer quotation and a private party inquiry make an unlikely pair. Yet each sits at the point where somebody wants to buy and somebody else has to organize the answer. Ivanovic has spent a substantial part of his career helping that answer arrive.