Otis Australasia Business Applications

CK Tan is the Business Applications Systems Manager at Otis Elevator in Australia and looks after the development of all the local business-related software applications. While not working on Otis' product engineering, CK and his small team of three write and manage all the systems for all the offices in Australia and New Zealand. That's more than 1,300 people relying on CK to provide the database management and software solutions they need to do their jobs most efficiently.

Reflecting an evolutionary path over the years, CK manages applications running on a myriad of platforms ranging from Natural/Adabas to NT4/APPX to client server to n-tier systems using Visual Basic, ASP and SQL Server. The local team has lots of experience optimizing and expanding applications on these legacy systems. Beginning in 2003, however, when looking to move legacy applications to the Web and the Microsoft .NET Framework, CK found himself facing a tricky migration challenge. Sure, his team was bright and wanted to learn, but the problem was that a couple of internal applications were needed quickly, and that didn't leave much time for training or practice.

"We were very productive using a 4GL repository-based development tool before we moved to Windows, so I knew the benefits of code generation could be impressive. I checked out several contemporary alternatives for .NET and was encouraged to learn that vast improvements have been made in terms of the quality of the code, the ability to customize the user interface, and to extend applications so that multiple apps can be connected. None had the power, speed or flexibility of Iron Speed Designer," CK says.

"What I didn't expect to find was how easy Iron Speed Designer is to use. That opened my eyes to a whole new transition strategy for my team. Rather than hiring consultants, I could meet my deadlines and keep the learning and expertise in-house.

"Even if we were all .NET experts, it would still take us three times as long to launch compared to using Iron Speed Designer," he says.

The CK Tan story

Born in Malaysia, educated in the U.S., and gaining work experience in Florida, Malaysia, and Singapore before moving to Australia, CK has been inventing and building software solutions to make employees in large technology companies more productive for more than a dozen years. He's been an advocate of Web-based applications for some time. Perhaps because the offices he is responsible for have always crossed regional and national borders, CK recognized early on the benefits of using the Web to manage complex systems across large geographic areas.

"I have always believed in code generation, but there were very few products over the years that I thought built the entire application well enough to be useful. We need a tool that very quickly can create the interface and application layer based on complex database schemas. We wanted lots of flexibility and the ability to customize every part of the application when required," he says. "I'm delivering high-quality code that we are proud of, and allowing my team to focus on custom coding, not infrastructure."

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