Case Study: Premiere Global Services
BACKGROUNDPremiere Global Services, Inc. (NYSE:PGI) is a global provider of on-demand business process improvement solutions that enable businesses to automate and simplify their business processes and to communicate more efficiently and effectively with their constituents. Our Premiere Global Communications Operating System (COS) offers hundreds of industry-specific business applications within the following solution suites: Conferencing, Desktop Document Solutions, Server-Based Document Solutions, Notifications & Reminders and eMarketing. Premiere Global’s eMarketing solutions enable customers to target key business processes for sales and marketing professionals – acquiring customers, retaining customers, and growing revenues. Headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia, and with presence in 22 countries worldwide, Premiere Global has an established customer base of nearly 47,000 companies, including approximately 80% of the Fortune 500. Additional information may be found at PremiereGlobal.com. CHALLENGEEarly in 2007, Premiere Global’s eMarketing team realized that a large percentage of its customers favored a more approachable application. Aspiring marketers were looking for a product that was very intuitive and easy to use, while still providing cutting-edge features to manage data, deliverability and campaigns. With this insight, the eMarketing group decided to develop a more streamlined, on-demand email marketing product that would:
The eMarketing team set an aggressive timeline of less than six months to have an initial version to unveil at its annual sales meeting. Premiere Global’s internal development team did not have the resources available to complete the project within that timeframe, so they began searching for faster development alternatives that would help them meet their goals and objectives. SOLUTIONPremiere Global ultimately selected Appcelerator’s open source rich Internet application (RIA) platform to develop its product – a platform that enables organizations to quickly develop next-generation Web applications using its simple Web Expression Language and RIA widgets, along with other standards-based languages like HTML and CSS. With Appcelerator, Premiere Global would be able to create an RIA with dynamic Ajax and DHTML features, without having to use JavaScript or third-party toolkits. Appcelerator estimated that it could reduce development time by a third – and application code by more than 70 percent – for Premiere Global, enabling the company to deliver its product on time. “It takes a lot longer to explain where a button will be on a page, what happens when you click that button, as opposed to opening an application and letting you actually click the button. It’s much easier to see how the application will perform, what needs to be fixed, and what you can eliminate when you’re looking at a working version of the app. Appcelerator enabled us to create a real app in the time it would normally take to plan the requirements gathering process. It’s much easier to develop a prototype around discussion of form and function than to translate a 100-page text document into a working app.” – Jeff Reese, Product Manager, eMarketing Solutions, Premiere Global Services, Inc. More significant than the technology capabilities provided by Appcelerator was the company’s proven methodology for rapid prototyping – Interactive Use Case development. Appcelerator’s Interactive Use Case approach enables organizations to quickly develop working, client-only RIA prototypes without any server-side programming. This approach would enable Premiere Global to immediately begin development of its solution, versus starting the lengthy process of document-based requirements development. With Interactive Use Cases, Premiere Global was able to translate high-level usage and feature statements into a visual representation of its requirements based off of an initial discovery session – where all stakeholders talked about what the application would do, who would use it and how people would interact with it. From initial discussion to the first Interactive Use Case took only a few days. Premiere Global was able to begin requirements, use case and UI development simultaneously as one fluid process, immediately cutting months off the development cycle. The speed advantages delivered by the Interactive Use Case approach is made possible by a message-oriented architecture, the foundation of the Appcelerator platform that separates client and server components during development and runtime – linking all elements with lightweight messages. Once UI development is complete, mock messages are switched out for the actual message – enabling the application to be deployed in Premiere Global’s Java environment – or against any other backend the company chooses to use in the future. Message-oriented architecture enabled Premiere Global to develop a client-only prototype without a single line of server code, enabling the company to show stakeholders a working version of the application, as opposed to a 100-page document. “In the past, we spent a lot of time gathering and translating requirements – creating documents to describe what an app would do and how it would work. Appcelerator’s Interactive Use Case approach made it much easier for us to bring parties together – to collaborate and build the best possible product.” – Andrew Osterday, Director of Marketing, eMarketing Solutions, Premiere Global Services, Inc. 100 percent of Appcelerator’s Interactive Use Case code is standards-based and reusable. As Premiere Global began to use the Interactive Use Case and make changes to requirements and use cases, it was able to make simple modifications to code to render a new version – in real-time – rather than having to rewrite portions of the application from scratch. Using this approach, Premiere Global was able to get feedback from its product, marketing, sales, and IT teams – as well as end users – during the real-time development of the solution. OUTCOMEPremiere Global delivered the first version – Alpha - of its new email marketing solution in June 2007 – less than four months after the project started. The product has since continued to improve through feedback from customers, partners, employees and other stakeholders, preparing the company for a full rollout early in 2008. “With Appcelerator, we were able to get everyone invested in the product development from the beginning, without adding scope or complexity to the product. Appcelerator provided a true platform for collaboration and teamwork, ultimately enabling us to develop a better product in less than half the time it would normally take.” – Mike Dickerson, General Manager and SVP, eMarketing Solutions, Premiere Global Services, Inc. The company was able to bring a new product to market that customers had been asking for, when it wouldn’t have been able to otherwise due to application backlogs and a lack of internal resources. Premiere Global’s new product required more than 70 percent less code to create than traditional JavaScript or third-party toolkits. MOVING FORWARDPremiere Global’s new email marketing product will be called Campaign Accelerator™ and is expected to launch early in 2008. The company is currently evaluating the Appcelerator Platform for other development projects. The company is exploring ways to integrate Appcelerator’s technology and methodologies into its R&D process, ideally providing a faster and easier way for the organization to test new product concepts, modernize legacy applications, develop more interactive and dynamic business services (i.e. enterprise mashups), or roll out new product functionality to existing applications. Premiere Global estimates that as its development team becomes more proficient in using Appcelerator’s solutions that its development costs on future projects could be reduced by more than 60 percent. With each new solution, Premiere Global will build a library of reusable RIA and SOA components it can use as building blocks for future applications. Less experienced programmers will be able to develop more sophisticated applications, using standards-based languages and Appcelerator’s simple Web Expression Language, and its growing library of cross-platform/browser developer widgets. Finally, Appcelerator’s true open-source approach provides the company with the greatest range of options for rapidly developing RIAs, extending the value of its investments in core infrastructure and service-oriented architecture (SOA), positively impacting both the top and bottom lines. |