In Philly, "changing the way code is built"

When, after years of late hours writing it, software works -- when, after months of sales calls, clients start buying it -- then the talk gets big: "We are changing the way code is built," says Chris Gali, cofounder of Enterprise
Cloudworks.

"Right now we are 52 people. By the end of the year we will be 75 or 80. My belief is that in two and a half years we'll be 350, 400, right here on Market Street, Philadelphia," says Jim Rourke, the firm's president.

Enterprise Cloudworks' chief product is Graphite GTC (Graph To Code), a software platform Gali says you don't have to be a programmer to use. More in my column in the March 8 Philadelphia Inquirer here. 

Business people who want to link secure data systems, mobile staff and remote cloud-based servers pick a string of shapes that depict basic business needs, and GraphiteGTC compiles software code the firm says is accurate, detailed, compatible with the bewildering range of common business software systems, rigorously compliant with Microsoft and other industry standards, transparent to make it easy to follow, and simple to update and fix.

The company started as Adminovate in 2012; that's now the name of its busiest division, which sells to insurance companies. Gali and cofounder Chris Doggett sold their previous company, Chester-based AdminServer, to Oracle Corp. for $125 million in 2008.

There are dozens of "Platform-as-a-Service" software systems targeted to corporate users frustrated by the cost and complication of linking secure company databases to mobile employees, according to this December report by analysts John Rymer and James Staten at Forrester Research. .

Gali, Doggett and Rourke, who have reassembled other AdminServ veterans and a platoon of recent Temple, Drexel and other local graduates to staff Enterprise Cloudworks, say theirs is better, deeper, more accurate, more flexible. Since there is little industry research on the question -- they weren't mentioned in the Forrester report -- I asked a couple of Graphite GTC users how it's going.

Chris Bauman, who manages a $90 billion (yearly volume) investment pricing, trading, accounting and financial reporting business in New York, told me he paid $150,000 to Cloudworks to create what he calls a "Trade Aggregator Tool," which collects and interprets data pouring into his office in varied formats to be "translated and consolidated electroncially into a single format."

How's that work? "You lay out what you need and the system creates the code without having to write something in C#" or other computer languages, Bauman told me. Updates -- an often-painful constant in regulated industries like securites trading -- "are now simple," he added.

When he asked his information technology group what a custom application to do the same work would cost, Bauman says it priced at "well over $2 million," plus updates at $50,000 a year.

"When you do this manually you have a lot of mistakes. This system, we loaded it and tested it and worked out the kinks," Bauman told me. "It eliminates a lot of mistakes. The manpower we need to maintain the system is much less. We're able to reallocate resources."

Does that mean -- as Gali says -- that users won't need as many programmers? "I'm a financial guy. This might be threatening to (our) IT guys. But for us it's more practical. I was able to tell them what I needed and this was able to design the code without me being an expert," Bauman said.

"Before, we spent all our time building a business-requirements document with everything spelled out exactly right. Any errors, and the programmers would say, 'Well you didn't ask for that.' "

By contrast, "this system, when we make a request, seems to understand where we are going and create a path that is easy to document to get us there. It is much more fluid and intuitive. I was able to describe what we need faster, and they did it faster, and gave us a continual-read definition of what we needed."

Did he shop around a lot? "I'm not aware of any other system that does this," Bauman said. "There may be more complicated systems. This was fairly simple as an application, for us.

"We can put multiple formats into a format we can import electronically and not rely on manual manipulation of numbers. We have given them another project."

I also talked to Dan Sehnal, vice president -operatoins at Enquizit, a McLean, Va. cloud software developemtn firm and Amazon Web Servcies-certified partner which claims Qwest and the National Park Service among its clients.

"We do a lot of work for the federal government in security and enterprise engineering," Sehnal told me. "Our mainstay is cloud and application development, and pulling legacy systems into the cloud."

Building software from simple business questions isn't a new idea, Sehnal noted: "The concept of a code generator, which, in the least flattering terms, is what Graphite is, has been around 30 or 40 years. What is so brilliant about what Graphite has done is that they've been able to fuse the concept of code generator into modern technology, so the code they produce is completely .NET compatible. It's Java-compatible. You can push a button and make it Web services compliant.

"And even more fun is the fact they've improved the concept of the graphical user interface to (illustrate) your business flow logic." It's typical for business software developers to get their marching orders from business analysts who explain in detail what's needed. GraphiteGTC is designed to do this automatically: the lay analyst picks a string of symbols for common functions and the system applies software business logic to generate the code that does what's requested.

"It will allow you to very easily draw your business flow logic," Sehal told me. "Once you've got all that established comes the brilliant part: you simply push a button and generate all this code.

"What I find really nice about this code, is it adheres really nicely to the standard Microsoft code generation process. And it provides isomorphic graphing between the process business logic, and the actual code," making it easy to check, update, fix.

"So if you use the program, and it doesn't perform, you don't have to go to this abstruse C# code" and rewrite it. "You go to the business rule section and see the piece of pertinent code that's relevant to that," and fix it, faster.

"What we've found in our limited use of the product and our client's use of the product is that the code generation has never been at fault." When there have been faults, "what has been at fault is the mission rules," which the business can easily repair and stick back into the machine, as it were, Sehnal added.

"That's the system operation and business analyst job, to make sure all the information is properly captured. When proper, there's 100 percent success.

"If you look at the test sample, the very last screen, you'll see 21,000 lines of formatted code generated in less than one minute. I'm totally impressed.

"In the federal government, the U.S. Treasury Department and the U.S. Department of Energy are using this product. It works well for loan guarantee programs" which need frequent updates.

Again, while "the concept of code generators has been around a long time. I have not seen anything this brilliant. They have been able to get their code to work at the early stage of the business definition project with a graphical interface that makes it so easy to use and learn. And push a button and get Microsoft, C#, .NET, or Java code, and mobile applications. And be able to access that same application. There's nobody else on the market.

"It's not only generating the code, but beautiful code, in Microsoft standard format that is 100 percent mappable to business rules.

"A lot of times companies send in their business analysts to learn the business rules, they put flow diagrams together, it takes a long time, they hand the package over and they have to convert the business logic into code, step by step. Painful.

"What's beautiful here, they can generate the front end (which users see) and provide graphic user interface to generate it even more quickly, compared to the manual process. They've (bridged) the gap between producing the work of a systems analyst, and then feeds into the work of a programmer. (And adds) graphical user supports, very quickly."

Once the right shapes are lined up, "they can generate the code with the push of a button. That is the key that is so beautiful here."