Mobile and Cloud technology
means faster time-to-market
The Neat Company, a leader in digital filing systems, in partnership with ThoughtWorks, delivered new mobile and cloud-based apps using a hybrid technical approach that meant faster time-to-market and lower development costs. Custom software puts Neat’s capabilities into a Cloud-based service, and gives customers ubiquitous access from their own wireless devices as well as desktops. This expands The Neat Company’s market and provides a new recurring revenue stream from service subscriptions.
Highlights ThoughtWorks helped The Neat Company design, build and launch a new line of mobile, web and Cloud-enabled products to quickly fill a strategic need. The products create a new market, as well as opportunities to cross-sell more than one million current Neat customers. NeatCloud service subscriptions create a recurring revenue stream in addition to the one-time product sales price. ThoughtWorks’ large-scale Distributed Agile, Continuous Delivery, and hybrid native/mobile web development approach all contributed to the fast launch of multiple complex products.
Neat has created a new way for small businesses and consumers to transform analog data into digital information. Neat’s unique combination of software and hardware scanning solutions use optical character recognition (OCR) and patented parsing technology to read information on receipts, business cards and documents and store them in a digital filing cabinet. Neat solutions simplify paper-intensive processes and enable users to easily organize, store, retrieve, secure and use information. The Neat Company’s products, including scanners and the desktop filing systems for both Windows and MacOS, were already market leaders, but sold only on a one-time license fee basis, and didn’t offer customers access to their information over the internet. The company had a vision for an expansion product line to run on both consumer desktop and mobile devices including not only Macs and Windows PCs but also the iPad, iPhone and Android devices. The new products would let customers perform typical functions from any device, anywhere, connecting via the internet to Neat services and the digital filing cabinet running in the Cloud.
Technology Ruby on Rails MongoDB iOS Android Chef AWS services for infrastructure
New software would turn iOS and Android devices into scanners using the built-in cameras, take advantage of the new Cloud services, and enable synchronization between all devices so that a customer’s information could be accessed anywhere, no matter where it was acquired. The Cloud services would be bundled on a subscription basis, providing a significant recurring revenue stream. This new product line would broaden the market for The Neat Company, fill a gap in the existing line for those users wanting to backup their data and have remote access, and create the first subscription revenue model—all important strategic moves.
The need for speed: Offshore Distributed Agile combined with Continuous Delivery leads to a faster product launch Needing to bring the critical new product line to market as fast as possible, The Neat Company called on ThoughtWorks as its software development partner. ThoughtWorks is experienced in creating sophisticated products for the web, Cloud and mobile platforms, and in getting brand new products developed and launched fast using Lean Product Innovation techniques such as Continuous Delivery. The joint partnership of Neat’s development team and ThoughtWorks based the new product architecture on Ruby on Rails for that platform’s development speed. A small team of ThoughtWorkers engaged continuously with The Neat Company technology and business users on-site, while a deep talent pool that grew to 25 developers, business analysts and quality assurance specialists worked from ThoughtWorks’ Pune, India office.
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The offshore approach is not always seen as a good model, especially when working with complex products such as this. What made this work was ThoughtWorks’ experience with large-scale Distributed Agile, and the use of communication and collaboration techniques that overcome inherent difficulties. Technical and business staff from Neat, including the CTO, the chief architect and the QA manager, travelled to India to spend time with the ThoughtWorks team there. Key staff from Pune rotated on-site several times during the course of the project as well. This cross-pollination gave the offshore team a real understanding of the business vision and value of all the project components, while Google hangouts and Skype for video calls were among technologies that facilitated the high level of collaboration that made the project a success.
For The Neat Company mobile apps, user login and access to camera functions to take pictures in place of scanning required low-level access to services for the various device platforms. These aspects of the applications were written as native applications. But large parts of the mobile device applications functioned by connecting to the new Cloud-based services over mobile internet. Those parts, which included pushing and pulling images to/from the Cloud-based filing cabinet, OCR processing and other components, were able to be coded in JavaScript with almost all of the code shared across device platforms. Development and QA time were significantly reduced, and ongoing costs will be lower for the client.
Sharing is caring: A hybrid app+mobile web development approach saves time and money. Mobile apps for iOS and Android devices were an important part of the new product line. The team used a hybrid development model to save time and money. Cross-platform development tools do exist, and promise to solve the problem of redundant coding and increased support cost and logistics. But while examples such as Java have succeeded on the server side, such solutions on the client-side (and particularly within the mobile space) have historically failed. HTML5 is becoming widespread and robust across many mobile phones, and it gives businesses a new way to develop mobile apps. ThoughtWorks’ experience with HTML5 and JavaScript development for phones and tablets shows that the mobile web can provide a user experience on par with native apps—for the most part. It takes expertise and experience to know how to blend native development and mobile web to create a hybrid model, using each where the business value demands it.
The Future: Over the last year ThoughtWorks helped The Neat Company design, build and launch the new NeatCloud and NeatMobile products. The products present opportunities and benefits that will bring in new customers, but are also perfect add-on products for the more than one million current Neat customers. They will bring in recurring revenues in addition to the one-time product sales price. ThoughtWorks is continuing to work with The Neat Company to deliver more features in subsequent releases, with all the work now being done offshore, by the team in Pune.
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Neat is proud to release NeatCloud, a new product line which includes a Cloud platform, mobile software, and updated desktop software. ThoughtWorks helped us scale our development team faster than we could have done through internal hiring and greatly helped us deliver and launch this complex software product.
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Rick Carragher, CTO, The Neat Company
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