Supply Chain Management System

Open Latitude
Mountain View, CA USA

At OpenLatitude, maker of advanced order management software for managing extended supply chains in the manufacturing and retail industries, Vivek is focused on helping OpenLatitude customers respond to problems, manage supply chain flow and fulfill real-time order promising.

In early 2003, Vivek and the product development team faced a tight deadline to deliver a robust product release. "Using Iron Speed Designer really compressed our development cycle", he says.

"Iron Speed Designer gave us a lot of utilities with no run-time drag. We got search, pagination, navigation and other standard page controls, transaction management and all the SQL statements for free. It saved us weeks of not having to worry about building those features."

The Vivek Karnataki story

Born and educated as an engineer in Mumbai (Bombay), India, Vivek has spent a career in the midst of high-pressure development deadlines. He predicts that application development will experience an even tighter squeeze on release cycles.

"A lot of world-class applications and products are being developed, but no one can afford to spend a year or more on development anymore. You have to be fast in developing and deploying. And, you have to be very responsive to customer needs."

"When you use a tool like Iron Speed Designer, you can concentrate your efforts on building the business logic", he says. "This tool freed us to make our product even more robust and relevant to our customers' needs."

Vivek also found that Iron Speed Designer relieved him and the team from the pressures of code freeze. "Sure, once you know the design, building something is pretty straightforward. But in product development, the requirements are constantly changing. The time it takes for us to turn around and add something back in is incalculable and used to spell death for on-time delivery."

"Iron Speed Designer reduced the overall timeline, but it also let me go back, make changes to page controls, layouts and features and quickly rebuild. In the past six months, it has allowed us to go through a number of engineering design iterations, all of which help make our product stronger for customers. Now, I'm stretching Iron Speed Designer to the limit and implementing all sorts of new ideas without restriction."

The most powerful thing about Iron Speed Designer

"I'm letting my imagination take charge. I now know I can adjust to meet the needs of my customers and the end-users, regardless of where we are in the development cycle."

What's next?

"This is the best tool I have ever worked with. It's simple and flexible. I like that Iron Speed Designer shares my sense of vision."

About the developer

Vivek Karnataki writes large scale, mission-critical Web-based applications for companies developing CRM and supply-chain products. "What I like to focus on is building applications that the customer will want to use".