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As you know, developers can be finicky beasts at times, and here at Point Source it's interesting
because you know if a developer is saying they like a tool that it really is high quality.
[ MUSIC ]
POWERS: Welcome to This Week on developerWorks.
I'm your host Calvin Powers.
My guest this week is Stephanie Trunzo; she's the Chief Creative Officer at Point Source.
Stephanie, welcome to This Week on developerWorks.
Tell us a little bit about the company.
TRUNZO: So, Point Source is an enterprise mobility firm.
So we do everything from help a client come up with a mobility strategy
to address their business challenges through setting up their entire blueprint
of architecture through actual app development and delivery.
Point Source is a firm that has been in business for nearly a decade now.
It has pivoted with the market several times; most recently,
pivoted to focus on enterprise mobility.
So it's been only about 12 months now that we have been focused
on building out this particular business.
POWERS: I understand that Point Source, since they've done this pivot,
has been a leader in some of the standards organizations, notably mobile services
for lifecycle collaboration in the mobile area.
TRUNZO: Absolutely.
So, Point Source is actually the first and only partner IBM Premier Business Partner --
that is MobileFirst capability authorized.
And so what that means is that we have done our best job at figuring out how
to deliver entire solutions for our clients.
Part of what we're doing as we understand how to deliver those solutions,
that end-to-end development environment for mobile, includes understanding
as we are evolving the market exactly what patterns are best practices
for technology in the mobile space.
So, as we look at this as kind of a second phase,
if you think back to when everything moved to the web, it took a little while for us
to understand from a technology perspective exactly what patterns are best fits,
how to develop the right kinds of standards to utilize that medium.
And the same sort of thing is happening now with mobility.
There's a different way of interacting, there are different kinds
of design and development patterns.
In order to make the most of this new kind of medium,
we have to understand now how do you take what we're learning and build that into standards.
So, open services for lifecycle collaboration is a great place for us to start contributing
that knowledge and the thought leadership that we're gaining by developing strategies
across industries for our clients.
Point Source has cofounded a mobile user group at OSLC and so we are starting
to define different kinds of scenarios that would then drive standards and specifications
for integrations across the lifecycle.
POWERS: And then not only leading in that space, I understand that Point Source was one
of the early adopters of the Jazz Hub platform.
Could you tell us a little bit about how you're using Jazz Hub?
TRUNZO: Point Source is a sponsor user for Jazz Hub.
We were really excited to get involved as quickly as possible with Jazz Hub.
Right now, I think we have about 12 projects;
some of them are public and some of them are private.
So, at Point Source, we are doing our own application development using Jazz Hub
as our collaboration tool.
So. we have our designers, developers, business analysts, executives, managers,
everybody who is a stakeholder in a project involved
in collaborating using Jazz Hub for our application.
Additionally, we're using Jazz Hub with our client projects as well --
so, not just the things that we at Point Source are developing and delivering
as our own offerings but working directly with the clients as well.
And the fabulous part about that is we can very quickly get a project started,
enable the stakeholders at the client site to get involved directly with us.
So, we have different kinds of teams that we formulate.
Sometimes, we actually own development end to end and hand off the IP and deliverables;
sometimes we are working in a collaborative team where we have development and design
and different resources from Point Source working,
collaboratively with resources from our client as well.
So, we have projects that have all of the clients
across five different industries involved in working with us
in private project areas in Jazz Hub.
POWERS: Very interesting.
Now, a lot of times when people thing of platforms like this, they think strictly
in terms of code and software development, artifacts and the catering to developers.
But your use of Jazz Hub is actually a lot broader than that, isn't it?
TRUNZO: So, a great success story and example is a recent new client.
About a month ago, we started working with an insurance firm, and we had a kick off meeting
and in time for that kick off meeting, I mean in matter of a couple minutes,
we had a Jazz Hub project created.
Our business analyst spent a little bit of time setting up a dashboard, loading up the epics
and requirements that we had discussed prior to kicking off the project.
And when they sat down for that face-to-face kick off meeting,
the CEO of the insurance firm was involved in the discussion and was so impressed
with how quickly we were able to set up a transparent dashboard for him
to see how the project was going to be laid out, that it opened the door for us
to have additional conversations on how they should set
up their development environments for other projects.
POWERS: Now, one of the projects I saw on Jazz Hub associated
with your company is an app called PS Whiteboard.
It was in the public space.
Tell us a little bit about that one.
TRUNZO: That is a really fun example.
So, at Point Source, we spend a good deal of time collaborating around design,
whiteboarding out different ideas.
And we were frustrated that there wasn't an existing app
that was just a very simple whiteboard application, something that you could sketch on,
you could import photos and draw on top of those, mock them up, leave the mock, share them.
There wasn't anything very simple on the market.
And so, we took this as a learning exercise.
We had a developer coming on board and this is as much a story
about learning IBM Worklight as it is about using Jazz Hub.
So what we did was challenge one of our new developers to take a look at a set of use cases
and develop and application using IBM Worklight as the development platform and using Jazz Hub
as the collaboration environment.
And within two weeks, she had a simple application up, running,
submitted to the Apple App Store.
And so the great thing about the PS Whiteboard project is you can go for free,
download the app, check it out, actually see it built in a finished completed applications.
And you can also go to Jazz Hub and see the Worklight code,
in addition to the transparent development process that we're following right now.
So, you know, another great example with IBM, with the Jazz Hub,
with our PS Whiteboard application is that just this week iOS 7 came out and I was messing
around with the Whiteboard app at home and I noticed some things that we needed
to enhance in order to support iOS 7.
And I went straight to Jazz Hub, entered those and my development team has all of my inputs.
So, it's not just our developers, as you said, that are actively involved,
but it's all of the people that are part of the project.
Even myself as the CCO of the company, I am working directly in Jazz Hub
to give them the inputs whereas maybe previously we would have been sending e-mails back
and forth.
POWERS: So, it sounds like Jazz Hub is used internally, by yourself,
you've got some public projects and you use it with all your core clients.
I mean, it's really central to the way you do business.
Do you ever get a little bit concerned about putting so much trust into that platform?
TRUNZO: Well, actually, no we don't.
And the reason is that, as you know, developers can be finicky beasts at times.
And here at Point Source, it's interesting because you know if a developer is saying they
like a tool, that it really is high quality.
And it just so happens that most of our developers have used Rational tools
in their past careers, in different roles that they've had; some of us even actually directly
in development roles in IBM in the past.
So, we have a lot of confidence in the products themselves and just a really good track record
of using Rational tools for development environments already.
So, as soon as we got involved in the Jazz Hub project, everyone jumped all over getting
on board and have been very excited about using it since then.
POWERS: Thank you so much for sharing those stories with us and spending some time
with me today on This Week on developerWorks.