We Thought It Was Us with Karthik Chidambaram of DCKAP
Scott Ohsman of Always Off Brand and I recorded our Slightly Off Commerce collaboration at Shoptoberfest in Nashville on September 15, and Karthik Chidambaram showed up with a camera crew good enough that Scott accused him of being Scorsese. Karthik founded DCKAP, and the shortest version of what it does is the one he opened with.
“ERP is the heart of a company. DCKAP is the brain. So, we make systems talk to each other,” he says.
I have known Karthik a long time, and what interests me about DCKAP is that it used to be something else.
The Prophet 21 Integration That Turned DCKAP Into a Product Company
DCKAP was a Magento agency, and a well regarded one.
“A lot of people in the market knew us as, hey, DCKAP. You know, they do Magento really well. You know, that was our positioning at that point,” he says.
Then Adobe bought Magento, and Karthik had already been watching the ground move.
“But then, again, you know, you saw the changes which happened with Magento, you know, got acquired by Adobe and all that. But we saw that coming,” he says.
The turn came out of client work rather than strategy. Distributors asked for something specific.
“And when we started working with distributors, you know, they said, hey, we need to integrate Magento with another platform, which is Prophet 21,” he says.
The integration was hard, and the conclusion DCKAP drew about why changed the company.
“We thought it’s us. You know, we were not doing it correctly, but then integrations are hard,” he says.
Karthik decided the hard integration was a product DCKAP could sell to every distributor with the same problem.
“Then we said, hey, why don’t we productize it?” he says.
Karthik is candid that the DCKAP team were not integration experts when DCKAP started building the product.
“And that’s when we started learning more about the integration space. We didn’t know much then, honestly,” he says.
Once the DCKAP team looked around, the team found the category already had incumbents.
“But at that point, hey, we don’t know about companies like Boomi or MuleSoft. And then, hey, you know, these big guys are doing the same thing. Why can’t we also do that? And we thought we could do it better than them,” he says.
Naming a Category on Purpose
DCKAP did not position against those incumbents on features. Karthik argued that general purpose integration is the wrong shape for distribution.
“Essentially, what that means is, let’s say an iPaaS integration platform as a service, you don’t want an iPaaS for distribution. What you want for distribution is ERP-first integration platform,” he says.
He puts a date on it.
“So, DCKAP created that category about five years ago. And now, we see a lot of people using that term,” he says.
Scott pointed out that anything arriving in this market without an ERP connection gets discarded eventually, and Karthik took the point further.
“So you need your ERP connected and with other systems. Otherwise, everything works in silos,” he says.
Why the Middle of the Channel Survives
Scott and I got into two-step distribution and whether manufacturers will cut distributors out, and Karthik answered with something he learned from a manufacturer rep. The rep sits between the manufacturer and the distributor, which sounds like a layer nobody needs until you ask what it absorbs.
“Because the manufacturer cannot have warehouses everywhere, cannot store the product. So, then, he needs somebody to take liability and ownership of getting that product to the distributor,” he says.
Then he turned it on the room we were sitting in.
“And I think even in software, if you think about it, why can’t shopware sell directly to customers? Why do they go through agencies?” he says.
My answer was that Shopware can go direct, and Shopware gets its value from the ecosystem of agencies around it. Scott added the reason the ecosystem holds up even as AI and the tooling improve, which is that it still comes down to the people and the relationship, because when things go wrong somebody has to pick up the phone.
Manufacturers Next, and a Company With No Office
Most of DCKAP’s business is distribution, and the expansion is toward the other end of the channel. DCKAP is now the integration platform of choice for Global Shop Solutions, a manufacturing ERP whose customers need the same plumbing.
Karthik also runs a podcast, Driven by DCKAP, about two years old and pointed squarely at the distribution industry. What he says he has taken from it is employee ownership, and companies that have carried it for a century.
“So, this is a great way for the legacy to continue for a long time,” he says.
The company itself has no headquarters in the usual sense. Austin is the nominal base, the team is fully remote in the United States, and much of it is in India across twelve states.
“So, we have mini hubs of DCKAP everywhere in India,” he says.
Watch the Episode
Karthik Chidambaram is the founder and CEO of DCKAP. This episode was recorded at Shoptoberfest 2026 in Nashville with Scott Ohsman of Always Off Brand.
The B2B Commerce Trends and Opportunities Report goes deeper on ERP integration and on selling in regulated markets, with nine experts who advise B2B sellers. It was written and researched by Content Cucumber, presented by Shopware, and it is free at contentcucumber.com.
For more at-event interviews, visit talk-commerce.com/events.