I know I have been a bit lax in posting on my blog but I truely have been busy with the rollout of the Uniface business across Asia, Australia and New Zealand. It's so busy we have had to recruit full time services people to complete work with customers.
Uniface by nature is a very quick development tool. Far greater than the likes of Java and .Net
One can say that the productivity is enormous and the return on investment is sometimes forgotten to regular users of the product.
Recently I was asked to attend a customers site to work with the new management team on an older Uniface site - to rewrite their contract for Uniface. They did not see the value in what they were doing and wanted to see if they could change their contract to reflct their success with their product. Some would say that this is a good move on their part. I saw this as an opportunity to show them the value they were getting.
So they could understand what they had and where they had come from, (as these were all new to the Company) I started out with a bit of history of Uniface and included their Company in the history chart. Working through the changes/evolution in technology and how Uniface has coped with that. Anyone writing an application in Uniface would not have to rewrite the code again as it morphed up with technology changes in itself is an amazing feat. Working with other development codes, this would have been a rewrite or a major enhancemnet at best. So what does this statement mean? Well consider the effort in rewriting code because your language cannot cope with the technology improvements. You are looking at a large team of developers to not only rewrite but to redevelop that application as well as look after the current application.
Uniface copes will all this and as a result, migrating to the next level (technology change and inclusions) is as easy as a recompile. This then gives the resources more time to concentrate on utilising the new features of the Uniface Product - this is sometimes missed on Uniface developers as they use this time to enhance their product or add new modules. they forget how much time has just been saved. I have to work diligently to ensure the developers are aware of the new inclusions when they do move to the next versions.
I have had a look at a number of Companies in a vertical market - one using Uniface to develop their product and four using other development languages to develop very similar products.
It is quite obvious that the productivity level is very different. The Uniface team had 5 developers and the others ranged from 45 to 120 for the same or similar applications. Just in wages alone, this is a significant difference. But what of productivity? Surely 45 or 120 developers would be harder to coordinate and keep in check on methodology of the written product. Why is it taking these guys longer to respond to market changes? They have more developers, surely they are faster? No, not necesarily as Uniface does a lot of work automatically under the covers that other languages need to do manually or redo constantly.
I think Uniface development is ahead of the game although I hear that younger developers say it looks old and is a bit clunky. This is probably true! It does look old. I also know that this is being re-developed as I write and that the world will soon see a more modern and easier Uniface IDE. This would be more attractive to the younger developers with the new look and feel plus the ease of use over the top of the normal Uniface development features. Once again no technology breaks!
Back to the Company I was talking to. Once we showed the cost benefit to the Company compared to some of their competitors, it was truely a revelation to them. It is always good to reflect on how you are performing compared to the rest of the world.
Uniface by nature is a very quick development tool. Far greater than the likes of Java and .Net
One can say that the productivity is enormous and the return on investment is sometimes forgotten to regular users of the product.
Recently I was asked to attend a customers site to work with the new management team on an older Uniface site - to rewrite their contract for Uniface. They did not see the value in what they were doing and wanted to see if they could change their contract to reflct their success with their product. Some would say that this is a good move on their part. I saw this as an opportunity to show them the value they were getting.
So they could understand what they had and where they had come from, (as these were all new to the Company) I started out with a bit of history of Uniface and included their Company in the history chart. Working through the changes/evolution in technology and how Uniface has coped with that. Anyone writing an application in Uniface would not have to rewrite the code again as it morphed up with technology changes in itself is an amazing feat. Working with other development codes, this would have been a rewrite or a major enhancemnet at best. So what does this statement mean? Well consider the effort in rewriting code because your language cannot cope with the technology improvements. You are looking at a large team of developers to not only rewrite but to redevelop that application as well as look after the current application.
Uniface copes will all this and as a result, migrating to the next level (technology change and inclusions) is as easy as a recompile. This then gives the resources more time to concentrate on utilising the new features of the Uniface Product - this is sometimes missed on Uniface developers as they use this time to enhance their product or add new modules. they forget how much time has just been saved. I have to work diligently to ensure the developers are aware of the new inclusions when they do move to the next versions.
I have had a look at a number of Companies in a vertical market - one using Uniface to develop their product and four using other development languages to develop very similar products.
It is quite obvious that the productivity level is very different. The Uniface team had 5 developers and the others ranged from 45 to 120 for the same or similar applications. Just in wages alone, this is a significant difference. But what of productivity? Surely 45 or 120 developers would be harder to coordinate and keep in check on methodology of the written product. Why is it taking these guys longer to respond to market changes? They have more developers, surely they are faster? No, not necesarily as Uniface does a lot of work automatically under the covers that other languages need to do manually or redo constantly.
I think Uniface development is ahead of the game although I hear that younger developers say it looks old and is a bit clunky. This is probably true! It does look old. I also know that this is being re-developed as I write and that the world will soon see a more modern and easier Uniface IDE. This would be more attractive to the younger developers with the new look and feel plus the ease of use over the top of the normal Uniface development features. Once again no technology breaks!
Back to the Company I was talking to. Once we showed the cost benefit to the Company compared to some of their competitors, it was truely a revelation to them. It is always good to reflect on how you are performing compared to the rest of the world.
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