Background:

 

A successful software business, Botsphere needed to develop an upgrade to its main product. The need for rapid development, platform and database independence and low infrastructure costs led the company to opt for an Open Source platform. This meant bringing in a different set of skills to those used to develop the original product.

 

Botsphere called in Screen Matrix to bring the project in on time and budget.

 

Introduction

 

Botsphere develops B2B software for the online betting industry. Its market leading product- RightPrice, sources and analyzes prices from bookmakers and online betting exchanges and uses this market data to help Botsphere customers set strategies to optimize their performance.

 

In developing Version 2.0 of RightPrice, Botsphere decided to base the development on an open source environment and adopt Adobe’s Flex as its development tool for the product front-end.

 

The iterative development process relied heavily on the highly productive nature of this development environment and the project was successfully brought onto the market within time and budget. As a result, Botsphere has increased the benefits its users enjoy from their product set and at the same time expanded their potential client base.

 

Objective

 

Having successfully built its customer base with Version 1 of RightPrice, Botsphere needed to enhance the functions offered by the product, while widening the base of potential users. “We operate in a very small niche market, so we cannot afford to lose any business from players in our market. Cross operability, database independence and the ability to feed and access data from different applications are essential for what we do.”

 

Process

 

The code, which forms the basis of Botsphere’s product set, was originally developed on Microsoft’s .net architecture. However, for Version 2.0 of the product the company decided to go down the route of using an open source development platform and to use Flex Systems Consulting to provide the consultants and project management skills necessary to bring the upgrade in on time and budget.

 

“The decision to use Adobe Flex as the development environment was driven for very practical business reasons”, explains Stewart Vassie. “It delivers the widest possible audience of users and the lowest cost of set up and infrastructure for developers. Just to install the latest version of a proprietary server operating system and database on a customer’s production servers would immediately mean you had spent around twenty-five thousand pounds before a single line of code had been written. Then you have to budget to upgrade it every few years.”

 

“Then there is the fact that we deal with clients who use different operating systems, different databases and different proprietary applications for marketing, accounting and business information. By far and away, the best way to build a product to combine with these is to build a front end to run in a browser. Adobe Flex runs in all browsers or in AIR, Adobe’s own run time environment. It is owned by Adobe but it is to all intents and purposes an Open Source environment with libraries of APIs to address different information gateways.”

 

“Finally, it is very productive. A lot of the touches which make a finished package intuitive and user friendly are there ready and waiting. One thing I have learned about software is that functional specifications change even as you build the application. I would only ever prescribe an iterative process for application development, which means getting the first version of the new product in front of a test group of users as fast as possible. Months spent on design are a thing of the past. Build it fast and then get lots of feedback from the users to refine the first version into Beta and then Production.”

 

Outcome

 

RightPrice from Botsphere is now being installed on client sites and the increased features and benefits have already brought returns for its users. The company has also found more clients who want these benefits and have increased sales into areas where they had previously been unable to operate.