Technology

Prior to forming GraphLogic, the Founders had worked in a number of companies in a variety of Information Technology and BioInformatics roles.

Their common experience was that:

• selecting a software vendor with an "off-the-shelf-solution" virtually never met their internal customer's needs.
• modifying an "off-the-shelf-solution" was never as easy as represented, was always over budget and took longer than acceptable
• writing their own application solution was never as easy as they thought, was always over budget and took longer than acceptable

And, when they managed to get to some kind of "end of job", having gone down any of these paths, they discovered that the needs of their internal customer had changed and now they needed something different! (Science has a way of continually moving ahead, sometimes at a rapid pace.)

This left the Founders in the uncomfortable position of always feeling behind the eight ball, pressured, and fundamentally unsatisfied.

The more they thought about the problem, the more they realized just how complicated it would be to fix. And they gave a lot of thought to problem given they had PhDs in Computer Science and years of practical experience.

A solution would require that the communication loops that stretched from the end-use-customer through requirements gathering to specification writing to coding, and back again, would have to be both shortened and simplified. There were simply too many middle men in the current process, allowing things to be misunderstood or important considerations to be dropped.

A solution would require that applications be easily modified, both now, when the same programmers were available, and later, when perhaps no one from the original team was still around. In fact, they began to think, perhaps it would be best not to require programmers be involved in the first place.

A solution would have to eliminate the need for compilation and software builds.

A solution would have to support compliance requirements for security, auditability, version control ...

After noodling on the mix of issues, they struck upon a radical, novel, revolutionary idea!

"We'll make the creation of software applications so easy that people with absolutely no computer science background can write their own."

They went heads down for several years.  When they emerged, they had invented an object-oriented, database driven, visually navigable, graphical integrated development environment that they choose to call PointDragon for its simplicity of "pointing, dragging, dropping and being done" writing the application.

Read more about their invention and its underpinnings in the tabs on the left.

If you'd like to try it out for yourself, go to the PointDragon website.