Treff LaPlante

Seven years ago we set out to build a technology that would solve the immense problems faced by business in adoption of technology. If you are not familiar with those problems, you need to familiarize with the now canonical Standish Groups’ Chaos Report, which among other things documents only a 32% rate of software projects completing successfully. During our journey, we encountered many cool things. From the beginning, we were early adopters of the LAMP stack; Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP. Further, we were able to leverage all sorts of open-source tools like WYSIWYG controls, time and date management libraries, an amazing JavaScript library called jquery, parsers, ftp servers, email and so much more. These things greatly accelerated our time to market.  Open sources was and remains really cool because it provides practical solutions to complex code problems. Soon ... (more)

Software Should Be Creative

We spend a lot of time talking to business managers about how their operations run. The perspective that we commonly face is one of "this is how we do it; we are looking for software to do it better." But from a business perspective, that is the wrong approach. First, the pain of software adoption is significant, and relatively insensitive to scope of change involved. Whether your software project is small or extensive, employees are going to be unhappy about it for anywhere between a couple of weeks and several months. But with all change, people eventually adjust and move on, a... (more)

Cloud Computing Adoption - Part 1 of 5

When my friend who works at an electronics retail store emphatically affirmed he knew what cloud computing was, it made me both nervous and excited. Cloud computing is becoming a ubiquitous concept. It has mass-market implications for the technology industry, and it is advancing at speeds rarely seen with any major technological evolution. As a business leader, do you know why cloud computing is important to you? What parts of your business should you be migrating to the cloud? Do you know what you don't know about cloud computing? First, cloud computing is about reducing complexity.... (more)

Everyone Is a Software Developer

For years, everything has been moving to computers. But it hasn’t always been easy. Many things about computers are highly technical, densely interrelated and generally frustrating. For businesses, it takes a lot of money to dive deeply into technology. Companies spend a material percentage of their budgets on IT-related products and services. The way the process works, you have business people who know what they want to accomplish, you have analysts who translate that into something systematic, and then highly trained developers labor for hours producing it. But that’s all chan... (more)

The Cloud is a Radical and Transformational Change

Thank you Mike Vizard for your discussion of why cloud computing will drive more custom application development. This is the point that seems to keep getting skipped in the many theoretical considerations of whether “the cloud” is hype or revolution. People are talking a lot about data center consolidation and reduction of IT expenditures, or shifts from capital expenditures to operating expenditures, and frequently in a tone that questions whether this even represents a material improvement. But in so doing, they are missing the real value gains; the cloud is about a radical an... (more)