Make’s modern day Crusade

If Make Technologies Inc. was movie, it would be Ridley Scott’s upcoming Hollywood epic of the fight between Christians and Muslims in the Crusade of the 12th century: Kingdom of Heaven. Except the battle would be between Microsoft Corp.’s .Net and Sun Microsystems Inc.’s Java in the developer environment.

CEO Michael Hagerman made a similar analogy when talking about the company’s philosophy recently.

“”It’s kind of like the religious wars. We’ve had Java religion since day one,”” said Hagerman, who was chairman of the company when he assumed his current role last September.

“”People are choosing Java because they have a choice of suppliers whereas dealing with .Net, you have one supplier.””

Automating code

The company’s founder, Christian Cotichini, now chief strategist, started the business in 2000 as a counter to the dot-com bubble.

“”How do you start up a company when you know all start-ups will die soon?”” Cotichini remembers asking. “”Unless you’re able to deliver value to the customer, you’re not going to survive.””

He envisioned a better way to create applications in Java.

“”Until now, most of the work would be hand-crafting lines and lines of code by hand with all the issues of qualities and deliverables associated with that,”” Hagerman said.

Enter standards-based automation (SBA). Make has centred its business around delivering automated software development to e-business, Web and enterprise markets.

Cost cut in half

SBA plugs into the developer environment and automates up to 80 per cent of code produced on any given application — reducing the cost of producing the application by minimum 50 per cent, Hagerman said.

For example, if a customer wanted to upgrade from an Oracle 8i to an Oracle 9i database, a developer would have to go through every line of a million-line code base to find the changes needed to accommodate 9i. With the push of a button, Make can go into the system and unplug the 8i code pattern template, plug in the 9i code and regenerate millions of lines of code that’s 9i compatible in a day.

“”That takes a day worth of work,”” Hagerman said comparing it to the other method, which takes three or four developers five months.

It has been licensing SBA technology to partners for a year.

Make recently changed its partner program, which Hagerman said was too complex. The old program had six partner categories: authorized agents, project partners, affiliates, certified VARs, OEM partners and strategic partners. That has since been pared down to two groups — large firms such as IBM Corp. and Sun Microsystems and regional partners such as Online Business Systems in Toronto and EWorld in Hawaii.

“”We’ve tried to simplify it,”” Hagerman said. “”The only way a partnership works is not by dialoguing around a boardroom table but by being out and working with clients.””

Splitting revenue between Make and partners is done on a case-by-case basis. For example, in a current project Make is working on with e-World, the partner is making 60 per cent of the revenue as it has established relationships in the state.

Three categories

Make Technologies is the parent company of Make Solutions, which is divided into three categories: create, integrate and migrate.

When a customer wants to build a new application, Make will create it and use SBA to do it cost-effectively and at a high quality, Hagerman said.

About a year ago, the first category comprised 75 per cent of the business. Based on current projects that Make is involved with, he predicts the create category to drop to 20 per cent, legacy migration will go from zero to 50 per cent and Web services to 30 per cent.

Migration is being driven by users looking to deliver Web services to their customers, which requires information that’s presented in real time. But Hagerman said only 20 per cent of current legacy system users qualify to move to a new system. He views the situation to elective open heart surgery. “”You better have a problem with the existing heart. You better like the new heart you’re going to get. You’ve got to understand that going from a to b is a risk.””

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Jim Love, Chief Content Officer, IT World Canada

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