[Commentary] A business owner's perspective of SW 2006

by Mark Kellenbeck
Cascade Management

As one of the few non-software programmers at this year’s Servoy World I thought it might be useful to have a business owner’s perspective of the conference.

Okay, what was I doing at a computer software conference in the first place? The answer is multifaceted, but not complex. What better place to verify the depth and breadth of a technology that I might soon be banking a business’s future upon. What better place to see the development talent that will be needed to build that “killer application” that will revolutionize a business? And what better place to meet first hand the people who are driving the future of the technology that could carry us to that bright new day in our business.

So here is what I discovered at SW. Servoy’s technological prowess as a Rapid Application Development platform for serious business applications is very clear. While I am definitely not a “coder” I do have the benefit of the love of technology, the perspective of a process engineer (former life) and a venture to India in search of technology to revolutionize my business. From all perspectives Servoy’s ease of use and depth of functionality are extremely clear. Every session in the conference repeatedly and convincingly demonstrated just how strong and mature Servoy has become in just a handful of years.

While there was surely a cross section of experience and development talent at the conference, one thing is certain, Servoy has drawn some of the best development talent in the world. The presenters were top guns and the exhibitors clearly ahead of the class with strong real world solutions, tools, and services to support the Servoy development community. Every programmer there had a vast number of other RAD choices and most extensive experience in other well known RAD platforms. Without question everyone whole heartedly and highly endorsed Servoy as the tool of their choice.

What about Servoy itself; its leadership, its key talent, its track record, and its vision for the future? Well, it is three in a row. Servoy while young and small is very strong and very capable. The companies resume speaks for itself, with all key players bringing their strong and successful backgrounds to Servoy. The company is clearly committed to the development community they service, with features, functionality, bug fixes being driven by the community; and major product releases coming at a very steady rate. In person, one could not ask for nicer folks and as a company you can see by their actions that they are committed to leading the SQL RAD market.

My conclusion is that Servoy is a very solid choice for any business which needs a custom business solution, built on solid and future oriented technology, in rapid time, with deep functionality, a beautiful UI, deployable on any java supported platform, including the web with the release of Servoy 3.0. If you can’t tell by now, I’m very excited about all things Servoy!