A Dog Food Powered Business
Our own dog food!
Many software businesses are great at “not eating their own dog food” (as Larry Ellison @ Oracle once said). Oracle took years to implement their own software, and for many years kept dark secrets such as their call centre using a Microsoft Access database written by one of the managers. Years ago, we famously took an order from Microsoft for an Oracle database!
So, what does a team with over 15 years of working in a consultancy business do when it comes to booking time and managing project time and delivery? Use Excel, use a complex package? Er, well no, we actually couldn’t find a decent PSA (Professional Services Automation) package that was correctly priced for a 20-30 man company that didn’t need customising beyond recognition. So, we built our own – named “TechRev” after a trusty Excel spreadsheet we used back in 1995 in our first consultancy company.
This runs across the web so our consultants and partners use it, no matter where they are.
TechRev is now evolving and we are looking to port it to Force.com (salesforce.com), Oracle Application Express as well as OpenSource (we’re still arguing over Java vs. PHP vs. Ruby on Rails) in the coming months. And as a mixed Blackberry / iPhone company, we want something mobile friendly.
It’s beauty is the simplicity, you set up a project (fixed price, T&M, risk-reward), project manager book resources, resources complete tasks and timesheet and expenses – then it produces billing schedules. There’s lots that can go on in a project but keeping it simple is what good software is all about.
So we do eat our own dog food, and watch out for general availability in 2009!
Software is Dead!! (or so salesforce.com would have us believe)
SalesForce have made significant improvements with the changes to their new VisualForce offering – basically, you can now develop just about any application on their platform. If it’s related to contacts and companies – even better, you can get around about 60-70% of your code already written.
Basically, it’s a hosted development, sandpit and live environment. You can mash in your existing applications at both the front and back-end – and best of all – they manage and provision the whole platform for you.
We’re trying out moving some of our Java/SQL applications across in the coming weeks to see how much code we can re-use and what the performance is like. It will be interesting to see how the reporting and dashboards can be enhanced with things like JQuery and graphical objects such as Flot.
