Rod Drury Address - Advantage Group SGM
Advantage Group Special Meeting of Shareholders
23 June
2000
Rod Drury, CTO Advantage Group, CTO and founder,
Viatx.
One of the problems we face as web developers is
that each of our customers needs a site that’s just for
them.
They want a site that looks exactly right, has
its own branding, its own functionality and is built
specifically for that business. This means each site is
built from scratch or code is duplicated, even if it is
similar to the functionality of other websites – even if the
applications are the same.
This means high costs for
the client and means we’re limited by the resources we have
to build and maintain those sites.
We’ve looked at this
problem and built a company to solve it. That company is
Viatx.
What our technology does is totally separate the
presentation layer of the site from the backend business
processes, meaning the appearance or ‘skin’ is separate from
the business engine. We call this the Single Instance
Development, or SID framework.
With these reusable
engines our ability to service clients increases almost
exponentially, and we can change our pricing model from high
upfront costs to our regular monthly fee.
With this
technology breakthough, our next step was to apply it to
highest value business problems.
Greg and I have spent
a lot of time with leading US e-commerce companies, it
became clear that whether they were online retail, trading
exchanges, portals or auction sites, they all used a subset
of the same group of model components. And we’ve now built
all those components.
What it means for customers is we
can rapidly build, high value websites using stable,
reliable, proven technology with a live code base.
Customers get a totally customised site while we leverage
and invest in our common engines.
The skins can be used
not only to build new sites but allow each site to develop
different interfaces, such as cell phones with WAP , or even
new consumer devices like Playstation II, which will take
New Zealand by storm.
This is third generation
e-commerce, the first generation being static online sites,
or brochureware. The second is customised, dynamic server
applications, which is the current norm. The third
generation is reusable commerce services, either accessed
through a browser, or even from business servers talking
directly to other business servers . This is where Viatx
lives.
We’ve been doing the R&D work in conjunction with
internal developers at Microsoft, using XML, Biztalk and
Soap technologies. We’re as advanced as anybody in the
world and we believe that we’ll have one of the earliest
commercial implementations of this type of technology.
So
how do we work with Advantage eServices? Viatx works well
where requirements are mature and generic. eServices does
custom development, and performs high value integration
work.
Viatx builds and hosts e-commerce sites using our
own third generation technology. We’ve built a full suite
of e-commerce components. This model allows us to change
e-commerce pricing for the common model from project-based
spend to to a monthly lease.
And so, how long till
launch? Our components are in beta testing now, we’re
already working with our first customers. We’ve set
ourselves a timetable of full launch within two months.
Keep watching our Viatx website for
progress.