Spiralcraft Solutions

Our goal is to provide information technology solutions to help our clients automate their business processes. Our solutions put our clients and their business community in touch with the information they need to achieve their goals. Our approach to providing customized solutions is best summarized from the following perspectives.

• Client Relationship
• Team
• Process
• Methodology
• Technology
  
• Licensing
  

Client Relationship

Our solutions consist of the implementation, hosting, and ongoing management of custom information systems built on our application framework. We tailor our solutions to help our clients meet new opportunities and augment existing business processes within budget and schedule constraints. These processes include interaction between employees, customers, and suppliers, as well as the entry, retrieval, and analysis of product, operations and accounting information.

The success of our solutions depends on a mutual exchange of accurate and timely information. We deliver our solutions incrementally in cycles. During each cycle we deliver a well defined package of information, technology and/or services which augment business processes. Each cycle involves a number of  interaction points to ensure that our approach is consistent with our clients' business goals, such as planning, documenting requirements, prototyping, testing, acceptance, training, and support. Knowledge gained during these interactions further defines the solution and improves the efficiency of future cycles.

We provide our solutions under flexible terms to accomodate clients at various stages of business development and internal IT capability. Where it is not feasible for clients to fund initial development, usage based licensing or a revenue sharing arrangement may be viable financing alternatives.

We work with our clients' internal staff, third party service providers and existing technology where feasible. We augment our internal design and hosting capabilities with third party providers as needed.

We partner with design, marketing and consulting firms who wish to integrate our capabilities into their solutions to provide increased value to their clients. We enable our partners to focus on their area of expertise while rounding out their offering with our hosting services, collaboration tools and custom information systems.

Team

A capable, coordinated team is critical to the success of a project. Our team is composed of dedicated professionals who share our commitment to providing effective solutions and refining the software development process.

Each individual on our team is highly committed to the projects we take on and is expected to gain an understanding of the client's needs and to contribute their input into the solution strategy. This ensures that the day to day decisions made by each team member contribute fully to the success of a solution, and that there is constant vigilance on the part of the team to detect and avoid the obstacles that appear during the course of most projects.

Our core team has years of experience working together, with combined business and technology experience developing IT solutions for a diverse array of industries.

Process

A formalized software development process is a requirement for conducting software projects within a business context, as it is the primary mechanism that directs the work effort towards meeting the client's goals. Our process governs the communication and implementation tasks that comprise the bulk of our day to day efforts. Our process information system provides timely data to our team and our clients regarding project progress, and serves as a repository for all project information.

The primary unit of organization of our process is called a deliverable. A deliverable represents an agreement between the client and our team to expend effort to reach a set of tactical goals, which are derived from the strategic goals that drive the client relationship. A deliverable is complete when the client and our team agree that the tactical goals have been reached.

Deliverables are organized at a level of granularity appropriate for the overall project environment. They will tend to be small at the beginning of a client relationship as solutions are explored and understanding is gained. As results are achieved, assumptions are validated, and visibility increases, the size of deliverables tend to increase in order to maximize the efficiency of the development process.

The event of completing a deliverable is called a milestone. Over the course of a client relationship, our team will reach many milestones in pursuit of our client's strategic goals. The deliverables associated with these milestones vary in nature. Some common deliverables are:

• Strategic Definition
  Documents the client's long term strategic goals and business constraints as understood by our team based on initial consultation and periodic review.
• Iteration Plan
  Defines and prioritizes a set of tactical goals and documents a mutual agreement to develop a set of deliverables designed to meet a particular business objective.
• Requirements Specification
  Details the tactical goals, system behavior, assumptions and constraints associated with one or more technology deliverables.
• Implementation Plan
  For one or more technology deliverables, defines the actual feature set, cost, schedule, business impact, and responsibilities of the client and the team towards successful implementation.
• Software release
  Delivery of software to the client for requirements exploration, testing, or production use.
• Training
  Instruct key users on the proper usage of the software within the context of their business processes.
• Support
  Services provided over time to manage information system deployments, assist users, respond to external events, and ensure that system capacity matches business needs over time.

Methodology

We deliver results by applying our solutions using a consistent methodology. Most solutions are unique combinations of common elements. By recognizing these common elements and by codifying the technology and technique by which we implement them, we have established a basis to predict the amount of effort a solution will require within a reasonable degree of accuracy.

We constantly refine our methodology in light of our own experience and that of others in our industry. We take advantage of new developments in technique and technology to the extent that they improve our ability to deliver competetive solutions.

Our current practice benefits from our team's experience delivering solutions through twelve years of innovation in the IT industry, spanning the widespread adoption of office networking, graphical user interfaces, SQL based database management systems, Internet technology, and application servers. We understand how to reap the rewards of new technology while avoiding the risks.

Technology

The centerpiece of our solutions is the Spiralcraft platform, which is a set of software components designed to support the construction, deployment, and ongoing support of our custom information systems. The platform provides tested and tuned building blocks which are customized and integrated by our team, enabling us to rapidly develop custom solutions which exhibit predictable performance and reliability characteristics, and which can easily accomodate future customization.

The Spiralcraft platform has been under active development since the founding of Spiralcraft in 1998. It is a synthesis of data processing technology, which has matured over decades of business use, and high performance Internet application server technology, which has been undergoing rapid advancement since the advent of the Internet. The combinaton allows us to deliver workflow driven data processing systems traditionally implemented using mainframes, database servers, and desktop software in a form that leverages the low maintenance cost and high scalability of Internet applications hosted on servers and delivered through web browsers and other 'thin clients'. This fusion also allows us to deliver web applications targeted at an external or public audience which feature dynamic content, user interactivity, and which integrate seamlessly with internally focused data processing systems.

Some of the high level building blocks contained in our platform that are readily available for incorporation into custom solutions include:

• Web service
  We supply a flexible, configurable web server and Java Servlet container as an integral part of our platform.
• User management
  Our user management components support login, registration, user profile management, and role based access control.
• Data entry
  Our flexible web based data entry infrastructure provides a basis for secure user interaction with business data over the Internet, using a standard web browser. Our graphical user interface framework provides more robust interaction from any client which supports the Java platform. We tailor data navigaton, presentation, and capture tasks to meet unique business process requirements.
• Data output
  We have tools to generate output in a variety of formats, including HTML, Adobe PDF, graphical, and tabular text files. Our templating engine permits end user or administrative customization of format and content.
• Data analysis
  Our data management framwork supports multidimensional aggregation and summarization of business data for publishing via any supported means of user interaction.
• Community
  Components such as a document repository, a publishing tool, a threaded messaging engine and a chat system can be integrated with application workflow and business data to provide a forum for task centric collaboration. The value of structured business data is greatly enhanced when it is directly related to the unstructured knowledge captured by this collaboration.
• Email
  Our electronic mail framework provides a basis for sending mass customized mailings containing application data and web content, triggered by application events. The Spiralcraft platform also contains mail server functionality that can be integrated with application data to support custom mail processing applications.
• Streaming Media
  The Spiralcraft platform includes server and application components which support the management and streaming of audiovisual media. We support both live broadcast and archived content, and a variety of client players. The integration of this capability into our platform gives us a unique opportunity to offer innovative solutions which combine streaming media with other application functionality.
• Process management
  We customize our in-house process management tool which is built on the Spiralcraft platform for use by clients who have a need to coordinate teams in the production of deliverables.
• Deployment management
  Administration tools are provided with the Spiralcraft platform which permit remote control and monitoring of all deployments. Our telemetry framework permits the monitoring of all critical application subsytems and provides us with information to tune deployments to meet actual usage scenarios.

In addition to the Spiralcraft platform, our solutions incorporate many third party products and technologies. Some of the well known products we support are:

• Java
  Our platform is built on Sun Microsystem's Java platform, which gives us the flexibility to reliably support a wide variety of hardware architectures and operating systems. Java has significantly reduced the cost and increased the predictability of our software development process.
• Linux
  Our preferred server deployment environment is the Linux operating system. We have found that the Java/Linux integration combines desirable security, performance and stability characteristics with extremely low cost of ownership given our in-house Linux expertise.
• Windows
  As Microsoft Windows is a widely deployed operating system, we support deployment of our server components on Windows where appropriate. No matter where our servers are deployed, we support all major browser platforms on Windows desktops for our web based solutions. We support our client-side Java solutions on all Windows platforms which contain Java implementations compliant with the Java specification maintained by Sun Microsystems.
• SQL Servers
  We support the use of a variety of SQL servers through the Java JDBC API, including Postgres, Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle, and Sybase.

The Spiralcraft platform provides explicit support for the following widely used technologies, which we incorporate into our solutions where appropriate:

• HTML
  HTML is the language of the world wide web. Our proficiency in HTML and the support provided for HTML within the Spiralcraft platform allows us to deliver robust, dynamic web based user interfaces where appropriate in our solutions. By deploying applications over HTML, accessible from standard web browsers, we significantly reduce the client-side IT cost of our solutions while making them available globally. By delivering a significant portion of custom data entry and reporting functionality through a web browser, our clients can focus their client-side IT budget on specific areas which require graphical user intefaces and client-side processing power.
  
• XML
  We use XML for a variety of purposes to reduce development cost and achieve interoperability between systems. Our use of XML as our primary development medium increases the value of our solutions by providing significant knowledge transfer and customization ability to our technology  savvy clients.
• TCP/IP, UDP/IP, HTTP
  We use standard internet protocols to achieve communication between the various components of our multi-tiered solutions. Our in-depth knowledge of these protocols allows us to deploy them with maximum efficiency for any given solution.
• SSL, HTTPS
  We employ SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) to provide secure communication over public networks between the components of our solution. We use HTTPS (secure HTTP) which is based on SSL to provide secure access to sensitive information.
  
• SQL
  SQL (Structrured Query Language) is a mature and pervasive foundation for data transaction systems. We integrate with our client's existing SQL database systems and use SQL databases as our primary means of data storage and transaction processing. The Spiralcraft platform provides extensive support for automated interaction with SQL databases within our data middleware layer, which augments standard SQL capabilities found in all SQL compliant databases with an array of functionality to support efficient data entry, processing and retrieval.
  
• PDF
  We support Adobe's PDF format (Portable Document Format), a platform neutral, widely supported technology, as our preferred means of delivering reports and published output generated from application data.
  
• SMTP/POP
  SMTP (Simple Mail Transport Protocol) and POP (Post Office Protocol) comprise the foundation of the Internet e-mail system. The mail handling capability built into the Spiralcraft platform allows us to build template based dynamic mail generation and processing capability into our solutions to enable features such as customer notification, e-mail based collaboration, and automated communication with business partners.
• OLAP
  OLAP (On-Line Analytical Processing), also known as Multidimensional Analysis, is a staple of decision support systems. The OLAP technology built into the Spiralcraft data middleware gives us the flexibility to summarize and present application data in a manner targeted to the specific needs of the individual or group who will be using the information. Coupled with our template based HTML, PDF and e-mail generation capability, our use of OLAP can be transparently factored into any of our reporting solutions without requiring the user to interact with a separate product.
  

Licensing

We never charge our clients additional fees to license the Spiralcraft platform when we provide it as a basis for our custom information system development services. We view our platform as an enabling technology which adds significant value our services, and as such we grant our clients a free, perpetual, enterprise wide open source license to use the Spiralcraft platform as part of our solution offering. This approach provides our customers with the security that their information system is firmly under their own control, that they do not have to pay additional licensing fees as the scale of their operation increases, and that they will not have to purchase their software multiple times to benefit from upgrades to the Spiralcraft platform.

For clients who produce closed source, commercial software for resale and wish to distribute Spiralcraft components as part of their product, we provide flexibile licensing terms based on our client's business environment, target audience and pricing structure.