Quintified

Quintify has an outdoor (sand) volleyball team that plays Friday nights at Capt’n Bill’s — it’s a lot of fun. This was our first season, although the core of our team played on Queensboro’s team for many years. The team is composed of former Queensboro teammates, clients, friends, spouses, and myself — with several players falling into several of these categories.

Last night we ended the regular season beating Queensboro, putting us at 12-2 and in first place for the season. We’ll get a trophy for this, and will hopefully win another trophy at our end-of-season tournament in two weeks.

Outdoor volleyball is so much fun that one of my hopes for my kids is that they’ll be playing this sport competitively when they are my age. As much as they hang out at Capt’n Bill’s with us, they should be pretty good by then!

On Thursday (11/12) UNCW will be hosting the Wilmington Area Professionals IT Breakfast in the Madeleine Suite from 7:30 AM - 9:15 AM. The topic will be the “Impact/Future of Cloud Computing.”

I’m going to be one of the speakers, and will spend the majority of my time discussing things we and others are doing with Amazon’s Web Services for cloud computing. This is a fascinating topic for me and I’m particularly excited about Amazon’s Relational Database Service (RDS).

The vast majority of the paying work we do these days involves building, maintaining, and extending very highly customized systems for “small” multi-million dollar companies. Our code generator spits out “single tenant” systems — each client gets their own programming code base. This enables us to customize anything however the client wants to the extreme, since their system has its own programming code, but it makes it a bit of a pain to “back in” new features that we come up into preexisting systems. (Just a bit though.)

In addition to building these types of very highly customized systems for relatively larger companies, my dream and passion has been to provide the power, functionality, and flexibility of the database systems we offer our larger clients to small businesses everywhere. However, to be able to scale well in offering standardized products, our single-tenant model wasn’t ideal — if you have 10,000 customers using your product, you definitely don’t want to have to manage 10,000 copies of identical code, one for each one!

Tonight brought the “aha” that enabled me to enable multi-tenant in our products, and I tied that in to a “free trial signup” form so that people will be able to sign up and get their free trial without us having to do anything. With this automation we can offer our databases to even the smallest of companies at an very affordable price, and soon we’ll be doing just that. And then, for any company using one of our products that wants substantial customization, we’ll be able to do anything they want with their system by “popping it out” to single-tenant status. (Imagine the response you’d get asking Microsoft to customize one of their products just for you! This customization is our bread-and-butter.)

I’m excited!