The question and answer session is a vital part of any presentation. As for me, whenever I am presenting any of our products to potential buyers, whether it’s Workflow Engine, Workflow Server or DWKit, I want my potential customers to feel like my presentation is a road map and all the issues I’ll cover in it and questions I’ll answer afterwards are signposts to direct them to a solution to their problems or needs, which is — my product.
For example a couple of weeks ago I had a meeting in one of Moscow banks. We were discussing DWKit, a Workflow Engine based BPM solution which includes a FormBuilder and a security module.
As a rule I use the following word combinations to describe it to our potential clients: “low-coding platform”, “business process management system” and “application template framework”. These are the characteristics I want them to remember.
Usually I begin by telling my audience that DWKit is a product for in-house software development teams, who design projects with a lot of specific features.
DWKit basic package does not include business logic, it’s a technical component, that is why its target audience are software developers. Our company is working on developing DWKit-based business applications, but that would be separate products.
Effective businesses never adapt to existing technologies. They customize software to fulfill their needs. This is the best way to maximize their productivity, and our job is to help them improve their workflow using our technologies.
Today I’ve decided to tell you about top 5 questions our clients are asking at the end of our DWKit presentations and the way I usually handle such questions.
Question 1. DWKit is a software development platform. Why do companies need it?
DWKit includes such technical features as data layer, security, role-based permission, formbuilder, workflow and business flow, which means that it will help you reduce time-to-market. Once a project is launched, a beta version of your product will be released in two months.
Our product also supports Agile methodologies. It emphasizes the speed and efficiency of development workflow. In most cases it is much easier to integrate business functions into such software, than remove functions in mass-market applications.
Question 2. Will we have to write functions ourselves? We want a ready to use solution.
If you have been lucky to find a product which suits your needs, start using it immediately! This will help you save your company’s greatest asset — time.
If you are still looking, I suggest you pay attention to the following criteria:
1. Launch costs (time + money)
2. Complexity of customization
3. Support cost
This is how TCO (total cost of ownership) is calculated. And I am confident that customization costs can be avoided, if you are using DWKit. At the moment if you want an easy-customized adaptive ASP.NET Core based product, DWKit will be your #1 solution. We offer full access to source code, so that you can inspect, modify and enhance your software.
Question 3. BPMN is an ISO standard. Why don’t you support it?
It’s a common question when it comes to discussing both DWKit and Workflow Engine. I usually deal with it the following way.
I explain that BPMN is a rather cumbersome standard, best for data analysis, unsuitable for software development. What we get in this case is an analyst creating a scheme, which needs to be approved by the customer first, and then developers are going to make a new scheme based on the original one. As a result it all leads to app conflicts.
We in OptimaJet, on the other hand, make clear and comprehensible descriptions of business processes and speak the same language as our customers.
Question 4. We’ve got tens of thousands employees and expect high performance from our software. Do you support horizontal mapping?
We tested Workflow Engine performance and shared the results in the end of 2018. This product allows you to process up to 1000 basic operations per second on an average server. When using additional business logic you can expect 200 basic operations per second on one server.
We are planning to publish DWKit performance test this spring.
As for horizontal mapping, we do not offer such tools, there are enough adequate offers on the market. But we are definitely issuing a horizontal mapping manual for DWKit.
And for now I recommend using NGINX to distribute application servers workload (how-to instructions are easily Googled). Use replication functions or other tools for MS SQL, Oracle and Postgres, if you have reached you database limit.
Question 5. Where do you see yourself in 5 years?
This is the question hiring managers usually ask. Funnily enough, it is a favourite question of potential customers as well! Let’s think about it, where do I see myself in 5 years? Sitting on a patio of my Mediterranean villa, that’s where! But you’d better check with the road map on our website.
Summing up…
Jokes aside, our clients satisfaction is our primary goal. In 2019 we’ll be focused on adding new features to our products and making survey, task management, crm and service desk demos and tutorials. Furthermore, our plan is to turn to serverless (Azure Functions и AWS Lambda) and cloud (React Native) computing.
