One Developer’s Story Part 6: The Future Revolution

Software development can be an amazing gamble. In this series, Nikolaus Kimla has told the story of how Pipeliner CRM was conceived and researched, how the goal of disruption was formulated, how he and his company sought an industry, the bold move of coming to America, going super-mobile and making the move to cloud-only. Now…

Software development can be an amazing gamble. In this series, Nikolaus Kimla has told the story of how Pipeliner CRM was conceived and researched, how the goal of disruption was formulated, how he and his company sought an industry, the bold move of coming to America, going super-mobile and making the move to cloud-only. Now we take a look at the astounding future of technology and programming.

Technology is changing rapidly to say the least. For evidence, we only have to look at GitHub, the web-based hosting service for contributive programming. Shortly after GitHub was developed in 2008, it had 2,000 users, and as of June 2018 has over 28 million. Technology can only make exponential strides with that number of talented people working on code.

I believe we’re at the beginning of a titanic revolution in technology.

BECOME A SPONSOR

Programming Resources

Because there are so many people programming today, some part of programming can be easily outsourced. When you have a fixed GUI (Graphical User Interface) and a classic framework, it becomes relatively easy for others to program for it.

Apple has led the way in the trend of outsourcing programming for apps, which is why they have accomplished more development than anyone else and their Apple Worldwide Developer Conference is booming.

We’re taking advantage of outsourced resources ourselves, and our advances over the next few years will reflect it.

The Misconception of Bits and the Masterpiece

Contributive programming, though, isn’t the same as having one main application and a ton of attached apps. There seems to be a current misconception that you can string together a bunch of tiny bits and come up with a masterpiece. It’s just not true.

Today you see systems with add-on after add-on after add-on. As an example, programmers are turning out countless add-ons for Salesforce so they can take advantage of the Salesforce back end; they want a distribution channel but don’t want to sell their apps themselves.

The problem is, as a customer, if you were to use Salesforce with all of these add-ons you’d end up paying a horrific amount of money, and the CRM TCO for just one sales rep would be extremely high.

As I discussed in Part 2 of this series, part of the philosophy we have adopted for Pipeliner CRM is cybernetics—the “science of simplicity.” Therefore, any developments we make, fall under efficiency and effectiveness. If we’re after simplification, we wouldn’t desire to follow a model of endless plugins and partners.

Runaway Progress

The enormous advances in programming—and the sheer number of people performing it—is what has made HTML5 so superior, so quickly. That is why we’re now riding the HTML5 train with our Cloud-only version of Pipeliner CRM.

From a product perspective, these tremendous advances give us an unbelievable advantage.

As an example: in the old days, if you were going to connect one software program to another, you had to actually program a connector for it. The next evolution was middleware—APIs (Application Program Interfaces) that were bidirectional. Today we have software systems that no longer need to program connections. The data simply flows from one program to another.

Lean Companies

Astounding advances in technology have also meant that, for many tasks, technology has replaced people. That means you can build a billion dollar company and still remain a relatively small team. Just a few short years ago, that was unthinkable—just as unthinkable as my situation today, having headquarters in California and my programming team in Europe.

Amazing technological innovation has also meant that companies no longer have to maintain their own data centers. In using our product, our customers generate and save an enormous amount of data. A decade or more ago that meant having a huge data center ourselves.

Back in the old days I remember quite well having to move our servers from one data center to another, and driving a van-load of servers through city traffic; an accident would have put my company completely out of business. Today, however, we utilize Amazon Web Services, so keeping our own data center is no longer a requirement.

We have reached a point technology-wise at which we have a perfect infrastructure—there is no need to “reinvent the wheel.” A business such as ours can simply plug into it.

These quantum leaps in technology will only mean greater and greater advances for Pipeliner CRM as the years go on—and for all the products and services you’re going to develop, too.

––

This content is sponsored by Pipeliner CRM.

This story is part of the AIM Archive

This story is part of the AIM Institute Archive on Silicon Prairie News. AIM gifted SPN to the Nebraska Journalism Trust in January 2023. Learn more about SPN’s origin »

Get the latest news and events from Nebraska’s entrepreneurship and innovation community delivered straight to your inbox every Wednesday.