It wasn’t since last year that we’ve had something to say. In the face of declining business, we turned our attention to rebuilding the engines of our key product Business Administrator, which went incredibly well.
Some twelve months ago, we decided to play with a new phenomenon we had discovered. In fact we’d been playing with it for several months to see what it could do, what its strengths and weaknesses were, and how it could benefit Business Administrator and our software development business. The results were very enticing with virtually no downsides.
In Autumn last year, we made the decision to implement it on Business Administrator. It meant a complete rewrite of the underlying engine that drives Business Administrator and expected it to take about two months. We got started in November.
We hadn’t realised at the time, but two new technologies became obvious to us as we developed Business Administrator. The project took just over three months to put the whole lot together.
We were, in fact, looking for something specific: we were looking for a gateway to the future. Business Administrator is an incredibly complex tool to design, and the ideas that we have in developing it for the future meant that the design would become even more complex. The downsides are that Business Administrator would become unreliable and risky and become too complex for us to handle economically.
We found our gateway. In redesigning something like Business Administrator, we use a sweeping technique to verify that the system works and stress-testing the reliability: you go over it once, and go over it again a number of times, each of which we call a sweep. But on the first sweep, we found Business Administrator to be incredibly reliable on that alone. Subsequent sweeps were mostly about [cleaning up the mess].
It was so successful that we gained more reliability than we had imagined, and the big bonus is that Business Administrator processes information like greased lightning. Even with multi-threading techniques, we found Business Administrator to be disappointingly slow in places, but, now, nearly everything is instant. And for a system that has to process so much information, that’s excellent news.
The gateway was even bigger that we expected. Given that Business Administrator is now so fast at processing information, we can now develop it to think more. This is important – we’ve always said that Business Administrator should be a business persons right-hand man: if it can think for itself and work with business people, then our customers will gain a huge bonus. And we don’t have to raise they price!
We’ve always marketed Business Administrator as a business-processing powerhouse: that was never more true than now.