The Future For Avanti

Transcription

1 The Future For Avanti Gareth Connor, Founder It has been over 4 years since I took the decision to launch my own software startup, a decision which has led to the Avanti accounting software products. 4 years in the software industry is a long, long time during any period but the last 4 years have seen astronomical change. When we began designing and developing our software, PCs using Windows were still the dominant platform for business applications. Web-based apps which run through the browser had eaten away a little of that dominance but still the PC and Windows was the safest bet as the basis for a software product that was going to see a fledgling software business through the next 10 years. Then Apple, a company which had long since been defeated by the Microsoft powerhouse, began to bear the fruits of the long-term strategy of it's inimitable leader Steve Jobs. The ipod had taken the world by storm in the MP3 player market. The next profound change was the iphone which brought mobile computing to the wider market and made it compelling for software developers to build mobile apps. With these successes, Apple's flagship PC, the Mac, caught people's attention again and achieved a previously inconceivable resurgence. But these were not, by themselves, game changers in terms of business software and how businesses viewed computing but they had prepared the way. In 2010 Apple launched the ipad. I look back with a red face as to my attitude to that new innovation at the time. I predicted it would be a gigantic flop! But my opinion was not based on arrogance or any kind of wish to see Apple fail. My opinion was based on what I had seen in the past. I'm in my early forties and I remember way back in the early 90s when Bill Gates was interviewed on Wogan (anyone remember that?) He brought on a new device that Microsoft had developed which he called a tablet. He demonstrated, quite badly, handwriting recognition and such like and predicted a world where every

2 insurance salesman and teacher would be holding one of these devices. I was a young computer programmer at the time and it seemed exciting to me. But Microsoft took a long time to get the technology right and it seemed that the mass market was not interested. Microsoft kept at it but it's focus in the 90s and beyond was on making Windows the dominant operating system and ruthlessly destroying it's competition. In later years we saw Windows CE, a version of Windows for mobile devices, and other devices from competitors such as Palm. However, outside of niche markets and tech enthusiasts, the concept seemed completely at odds with what the public and the business community wanted from their computing devices. Perhaps more telling is that the software development community saw developing apps for mobile as a risk with little end-user adoption and without the apps to make these devices useful the end-user had little interest in buying them. Perhaps then, what I had missed when the ipad was launched was a shift in this chicken and egg scenario. The iphone and it's operating system, ios, had established a market and a vibrant ecosystem where there were plenty of app developers and end-users for their mobile device. When Apple launched the ipad they made the ingenuous decision to port their ios operating system from the iphone to the ipad and immediately brought over every app and potentially every user with it, immediately opening up the tablet market to this ecosystem of apps and users. With more room for scope for developing apps on the ipad and with a massive willing community of users ready to buy and use those apps, Apple has successfully achieved something early pioneers Microsoft and Palm (and indeed Apple themselves with earlier attempts) had never managed. What followed was an explosion which very few could have predicted. However even with the massive success of the ipad tablet, it was only the beginning. The ipad had blazed a trail for a thousand and one imitators and particularly with the rival mobile operating system Andriod from search engine megalith Google. While the ipad may have been out of the price range of many, these imitators saw to it that people could get their hands on equally powerful tablet devices at a much lower price point. There are now an even more diverse set of systems emerging with Microsoft (Windows Phone 8) and Blackberry (Blackberry 10) both launching operating systems and devices to compete with Apple and Andriod and there are other new rivals systems emerging such as the Samsung-backed Tizen OS. All are jockeying

3 for dominance in this rapid growth market. The power of these devices are such that they are now rivalling the good ole PC laptop and notebook. Now we're in an age where computing is transitioning from the traditional PC to tablet devices. The BYOD revolution is under way at large companies where employees are bringing their mobile devices to work to do their jobs and what happens at the corporate level almost always eventually filters down to the smaller business. All of the stats seem to point to an irreversible trend that the tablet device will become the new PC and the computing device of choice for small businesses. It has already started to happen and will accelerate over the next 2-4 years. Another key change we are seeing is the move to cloud computing meaning the maintenance and access of data and resources in the cloud (meaning on a webserver somewhere) rather than sat on a standalone PC or an in-house network. This does not necessarily mean that the software itself has to run in the cloud, although this is also becoming more popular, however it does mean that small businesses are more and more needing to share access to their information with people working in other locations whether they are home-working employees, business partners, customers or accountants. For a software business like Avanti this is a time where we must meet these changes and challenges in the computing and technology landscape. We have a small team of software developers who have developed a great product but we have to acknowledge that the platform upon which is it based, Windows, and the demand for applications which run on it is starting a decline and it's dominance is under threat. Under these circumstances we simply cannot afford to sit still if we are to succeed into the future. However it is during times of great change where the greatest opportunities are to be found. And for this very reason we are extremely optimistic about the future. Weaknesses into Strengths It important to turn our weaknesses into strengths. It can be perceived that our primary weakness is that we have a one-platform (Windows), desktop-based software application. It is true that Windows is starting to decline and no longer enjoys the benefit of being the only obvious, de facto platform choice for small

4 businesses. However it still demands a huge percentage of the small business application market and will continue to do so for many years to come. Many software publishers have, in haste, moved their products entirely away from it, focusing on cloud-only solutions or have disconnected their cloud solutions from their desktop products. We believe this is a mistake because the demand is still high and having a solution for this platform will offer a competitive advantage for those, like us, who continue to have solutions for it into the future for users who are happy and comfortable using it. But this only applies if we have solutions for the other high-demand platforms as well and only if the applications on each different platform are integrated. Therefore our Windows application will continue to represent a large part of our development efforts and strategy for the longterm. In tandem with our cloud development efforts we see having a desktop Windows application as a real strength despite the tidal wave of platform diversity. Cloud Computing We are seeing more and more demand for users to be able to share their information with people from outside the four walls of their business. The most obvious and simple way to do this is to maintain and access data and resources in the cloud. This enables users to share information over the internet with anyone they want to have access to their live data. They can use the installed Avanti software on Windows to access and utilise their data and resources almost as though it were sat locally. We can therefore see a requirement to enable our existing software to access and utilise data remotely as well as locally on a standalone desktop PC or internal network. Our cloud-based service is something which will be enabled with the release of Version 3. Multi-Platform As a small software company we do not have the manpower or resources to rewrite applications from scratch for every platform we want to target. We are therefore reliant on technology from outside to enable us to utilise our existing software code-base and port it to other platforms. This also needs to be done in such a way where we can still largely maintain and develop the software from a single code-base across multiple platforms the overhead of having to replicate the work involved in developing new features 2 or 3 times for different platforms is not sustainable. The technology we use to develop Avanti has advanced to achieve this for the Apple Mac and also shortly for ios (iphone & ipad) with the promise of support

5 for Andriod later. A great deal of work has to be done on our existing Windows code-base to achieve our goal of one-codebase/multiple platforms and we shall go some way closer to achieving this with Version 3. Apple Mac The Apple Mac is a desktop platform which is gaining in popularity and is one of those platforms which is taking share away from Windows. As mentioned above, we now have the technology available to port our software to the Mac without a re-write. However in order to achieve a true Mac native edition of Avanti there is still some work to be done. Following the release of Version 3 and our cloud service, we will start to carry out the work necessary to port Avanti to the Mac. Web Web apps are those which run in your web-browser and access software, data and resources from the cloud/web-server a software architecture sometimes known as the web platform. They have many pros and cons compared to desktop-based software applications. Many of the cons, such as not having as rich a user experience or functionality as a desktop app still apply however these are slowly being eroded with the advancements in browser technology. One of the greatest pros for web apps is their access-anywhere ability. As software is accessed from a web-server to be run in the browser there is no need to have any software installed on a computer to access it other than a web browser. You could for example be sat in an internet café in Magaluf (or maybe not!) using a computer which has no other software installed on it and can access your software and data. The other key benefit of web-apps is that, provided they are designed correctly, they can be run through both the mobile browser and as first class citizen apps on any and all mobile device platforms be it ios, Android, Windows Phone, Blackberry 10 or any other. And here we come to the crux of the matter. There are simply too many advantages to making Avanti available for the web platform to ignore. Enabling an access-anywhere application on any computing device whether PC, phone or tablet across any applicable platform is a no-brainer amidst the technological shifts that we are seeing. This all seems too good to be true. Where's the catch? The catch is, we cannot port our existing application to the web platform. The way in which a web app is

6 constructed is so fundamentally different than a desktop app, the technologies and languages so diverse that we have to face the harsh reality that to realise all of the advantages of having a web platform edition of Avanti we must re-write the software utilising key web technologies. It would however be a monumental, time-consuming and business-risking task to put all of our development efforts for at least a year into re-writing our software for the web platform. Therefore we shall achieve it incrementally. Rather than developing until the web app has complete feature parity with our desktop app we shall look to build it in stages, make those advancements available to users, get feedback, develop the next stage and so on. It may take longer overall however it will enable Avanti to be available on the web and mobile much sooner, even initially as a subset of the desktop application. Mobile As mentioned above, having a web app for Avanti will cater for mobile devices. However web apps have a fundamental weakness. If you are not connected they will not work. As web apps rely on grabbing data and software from a remote web-server, if you're not online then you don't have access to your app. Also there has to be consideration for users who do want to move away from desktop PCs and over to tablets but who want to use them as their computing device as they would a PC. They may want to hold their data locally or at least have access to their data locally on their device if their connection is lost. We can therefore look to develop a range of versions of Avanti specifically designed to work as native applications on tablet devices which work on local data access just like a standalone PC application and/or with optional remote data access (as with our proposed cloud-based service). As mentioned earlier we shortly expect there to be the technology available to port our existing code-base to ios and later to Andriod, without having to rewrite the application which will cater for this need. Integration It is important that the key element to all of this and to having our application available on all platforms and all devices, whether connected or disconnected, is integration. You should be able to access your data and information with Avanti

7 whether you are using a desktop app on a Windows PC or an Apple Mac standalone or on an internal network, using a web-browser on any PC, Mac, phone or tablet or from a native app on a tablet. The choice of how, where and what you use should be entirely down to the requirements of each user. Each app on each device should not be seen as a separate element but one of many choices which each person has in different circumstances and locations all making up an integrated business system anywhere, any platform, any device. Time scales Some of the elements that we have mentioned here already have concrete plans and have scheduled time scales. Version 3 will be a big step toward most of what we want to achieve and we expect to release this in mid-2013 we cannot be any more specific than that at this stage. Our cloud-based service, enabling you to be able to access and share your data in the cloud, will be made available shortly after Version 3 is released. The Mac edition of Avanti we plan for release at the beginning of Q but we cannot be more specific presently. We expect to see the first elements of Avanti for the web (including mobile) before the end of 2013 but it is way too early at this stage to be confident of this and research is on-going. It seems a long way off at the moment, but we hope to have implemented all of the plans laid out in this document by the end of Other Developments Obviously we have focussed here on our plans for major developments to cater for Avanti on multiple-platforms, mobile, cloud and the web. However we continue to plan for quarterly feature releases, an annual major version release along with plans for higher level editions of the software. Version 3 will certainly introduce some exciting developments that we'll reveal closer to release. All feature releases and new versions will continue to be driven by user demand and feedback. Conclusion In these changing times we cannot stand still and expect that the status quo will persist. We must be prepared, plan and advance to meet the challenges we face in light of the beginning of the decline of existing platforms and the plethora of emerging platforms especially in the mobile space. We must adopt the

8 technologies which enable us to utilise our existing investments where possible but not be afraid to accept and develop a workable plan to move forward in the areas where that solution is not possible. In meeting these challenges head-on we are embarking on massive and necessary changes. We are not however abandoning the solutions which have got us this far and indeed in committing to their continuing development and support we can see them as a major strength rather than a weakness. Important This document outlines a vision for the future software development strategy for Avanti Business Software. We make no guarantees whatsoever that all of the plans will be implemented or that they will be made available in the time scales outlined. We strongly advise therefore you do not make any decisions based on the information in the document which may impact or result in adverse consequences for your business should elements of the strategies outlined in this document not be implemented or be implemented outside of any specified time scale. In reading and acknowledging this document you are giving your consent and agreement to these provisions.