A handbag distributor in Montreal used to need a full workday to assemble one detailed inventory report. The information lived partly in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central and partly in the habits formed around an older, Excel-shaped system. After HB Connections adopted Popdock, the report took less than 10 minutes. No moonshot. No robot executive. Just Tuesday afternoon returned to its owner.
That is the eOne Solutions sales pitch in its most persuasive form. The Fargo company makes software for the uncelebrated seams of a business: an invoice entered in one system that must appear in another, an old general ledger somebody still needs to search, a dashboard that should sit inside the ERP instead of forcing the user through three tabs and a CSV export.
Its main products divide the job neatly. SmartConnect moves and transforms data. Popdock combines, reports on and exposes data, often without moving it at all. Together they form an integration platform aimed at mid-market companies running systems such as Microsoft Dynamics, Oracle NetSuite, Salesforce, Zendesk, HubSpot and assorted databases, files and APIs. eOne calls the combination physical and virtual integration. That phrase sounds technical; the practical question is almost domestic: does this record need a new home, or does the person merely need to see it?
The coffee-shop switch
The company’s origin is pleasingly analogue. In 2001, accountants Martin Olsen and Simon Butler met in a Sydney coffee shop and began an implementation practice around Microsoft Dynamics GP. They soon found that customers kept paying developers to fill the same gaps in reporting and customization. The first thing that failed was not the ERP itself. It was the economics around it: too much bespoke work for problems that repeated from one company to the next.
Their answer was to package the fixes. SmartList Builder and Extender arrived in 2003. A year later, Microsoft put the tools on its price lists through an OEM agreement. Olsen and Butler sold the implementation practice, later absorbed into DXC, and concentrated on being an independent software vendor. This was the consequential choice: stop billing for the recurring pain and own the tool that removes it.
SmartConnect followed in 2008, first automating file integrations for Dynamics GP and connecting it to Microsoft CRM and Salesforce. When the Microsoft OEM arrangement ended in 2014, eOne had roughly 15,000 customers to bring into its own direct and partner operation. The company says it automated the transition with its own software. This is the sort of dog-food story software firms adore, but here it also reveals the culture: configure the repetitive process, preserve the exceptions, and avoid hiring a small army to babysit it.
Two verbs, one company
The eOne decision
SmartConnect is the mover. A finance or IT team builds maps that pull data from a source, apply rules, write to a destination, schedule the job and report errors. It can run in the cloud or on premises. This is useful when the destination must own the transaction - an approved expense from Concur becoming a payable in Business Central, for example, or employee data reaching Dynamics GP each night.
Popdock is the viewer with unusually long arms. It builds lists and cross-system reports, embeds them in applications and can present legacy records from a database or data lake without loading all that history into a new ERP. That matters during migrations. The migration team wants a clean cutover; the finance team still wants last decade’s invoices. Copying everything satisfies the second demand by making the first project slower and more expensive. Popdock’s virtual-integration answer is to keep history accessible without pretending it is current operational data.
“What used to take me a day to create now takes me 10 minutes.”Daniel Orozco, director of operations at HB Connections
The products are no-code, but “no-code” should not be confused with “no thinking.” Someone still has to know which customer record is authoritative, how a failed map should recover, and whether a dashboard is showing yesterday or this second. eOne’s real expertise is ERP plumbing - especially Microsoft Dynamics - translated into controls that business-system owners can operate.
The $150,000 counterfactual
Aidacare, an Australian healthcare-equipment company, offers the clearest account of what changed a customer’s mind. Its finance systems manager, Arthur Achilleos, had used eOne tools for years and had built a custom reporting setup. He initially saw no reason to add Popdock. Then a video showed him that Popdock could create an OData feed from a database outside Dynamics GP and expose history without constantly syncing it. The product was no longer another reporting screen. It was a way to avoid moving a mountain of old data.
Aidacare also used SmartConnect for a contract-management portal and reduced 20 integration points to one. Achilleos estimated that an external partner would have charged $150,000 or more for comparable development; his internal build took about six months and roughly $100,000 of effort. That is not free software magic. It is a different allocation of cost: subscription plus internal ownership instead of a larger custom engagement.
Other cases give the pattern a stopwatch. The Printing House replaced a slow Microsoft Integration Manager routine that required a 6 a.m. human start. Its new scheduled workflow ran 90 percent faster, and one multi-system account process fell from 24 to 48 hours to five to 10 minutes. Detroit Wayne Integrated Health Network says automation and reporting tools save more than 15 hours a week. Eagle’s Flight says one Concur map saves at least four.
What failed first in these companies was usually mundane: manual entry, a dropped distribution, a report only one employee knew how to assemble, or an early-morning import with a human alarm clock. That is useful because it suggests a buying method. Do not begin with “enterprise integration strategy.” Begin with the workflow everybody curses by name.
The price of fewer moving parts
eOne publishes pricing, which makes the trade less abstract. In the United States, Popdock starts at $150 a month for 1,000 monthly queries; its Business plan is $350 and Premium is $650. SmartConnect starts at $350 a month for two connections, rises to $650 for five and $1,250 for a Premium plan with eight total connections. Combined iPaaS packages start at $700 a month for a three-month migration bundle, $800 for Business and $1,500 for Premium. Annual commitments generally apply, and extra connections, query volume, advanced support or implementation can add to the bill.
The 2024 pricing change bundled more of the portfolio into subscriptions and introduced support tiers. Existing customers were offered transition pricing; annual prepayment and multi-year commitments could earn discounts. The business model is now legible: recurring software revenue, distributed directly and through more than 350 solution partners, plus training, support and professional services. It is built for a customer large enough to have cross-system pain but small enough to flinch at enterprise middleware and an open-ended consulting statement of work.
A rebuild with 15 years of baggage
In 2026, eOne rebuilt SmartConnect from the ground up. The new version separates configuration from logging data, uses distributed processing so one customer’s map does not crowd another’s, and adds drafts, audit trails, granular permissions and a live health dashboard. The interface moved to React and adopted the same design language as Popdock. Salesforce, NetSuite, REST, Zendesk, Dropbox and Google Drive connectors appear across the roadmap, along with a migration tool for existing SmartConnect environments.
The reason for the rebuild is bigger workloads and a less forgiving operational standard, but AI supplies the new plot. PopdockAI entered beta in February 2026 as a standalone product. Its MCP server is designed to let compatible assistants query business data through governed datasets, natural-language definitions and existing permissions. The idea is sensible precisely because it is not “give the chatbot the database password.” Scope the tool, expose only the necessary records, and log the interaction.
This is where eOne’s old obsession looks current. An AI assistant does not necessarily need another lake full of copied tables. It needs reliable context, understandable fields and permission to answer a narrow question. Virtual integration becomes a data-governance choice, not merely a migration shortcut.
The part worth copying
eOne’s customers offer a compact playbook for any systems team. Pick one workflow with a visible failure and a measurable clock. Decide which system owns each record. Move only the data that another application must transact on. Leave historical or reference data where it is when an embedded view will do. Put error notifications into the first map, not the postmortem. Then let the people who live with the process extend it.
- Start with one hated, repeated task
- Name the owner of every field
- Move transactions, expose history
- Design the failure notification first
This works when the work repeats, the APIs or databases are available, and a finance or IT owner understands the business rules. It works less well for a one-off cleanup, a process still changing every week, or an organization hoping “no-code” means no accountable operator. The tool can make a map maintainable. It cannot decide what a customer is.
Where eOne fits
The broad integration market includes Workato, Boomi, Celigo, Jitterbit, MuleSoft, Azure Logic Apps and Power Automate, plus custom APIs and SQL jobs. eOne’s position is narrower and more specific. It sits close to the mid-market ERP, sells through consultants who already know the customer’s ledger, supports cloud and on-premises deployments, and couples data movement with virtual access and embedded reporting.
That combination is the differentiator, not a claim to have invented integration. A company can replace SmartConnect with code or another iPaaS. It can replace Popdock with replicated warehouses, Power BI and ERP-native reports. What eOne offers is a smaller set of decisions under one roof: copy this, expose that, automate the handoff, show the error. For 25 years, it has been turning those decisions into software. The business systems are still awkward. That may be the most durable market thesis of all.