Wandering Data

And not the electric guitar kind…

Yes, I’m a developer working deep down in the bowels of the code – striving to make it better, faster, able to leap tall buildings in a single bound. The problem is UltraLite and UltraLiteJ are just one piece of a great mobility solution offered by us and is in fact, not even sold as a separate product. We don’t get nearly as good a feel as to who is using it and what is being done with it. Sure we (Product Management and Development) hear about some of the big projects but we know there are some very interesting uses out there that slip our radar.

So why should you care? I can sum it all up with one example. A number of months ago we had a pre-sales inquiry as to whether UltraLiteJ could handle a particular scenario. Product management or our support specialist quickly created a sample and tried it out on a device to promptly discover that, yes indeed, UltraLiteJ could easily meet the performance requirements given the particulars of the request.

Yet the story does not end here. They told me about this customer and described to me the environment they were working in (we were lucky because we were given the full schema and class of devices). This sat in the back of my mind for a little bit when another issue came up that brought this story to the foreground. I figured out that there could be some issues that would not show up unless the client application ran for a significant amount of time. We added better code and thus UltraLiteJ was improved, to the benefit of all, long before the customer went to production.

What caught our attention were the particulars of the environment (ok, it is hard to write this while keeping the details private because I don’t know if we are under NDA) – it wasn’t a giant deal but it was a neat everyday use of our technology – one we might encounter in our everyday travels and it didn’t come from the usual support channels.

Letting us (Product Management at Sybase iAnywhere) know the environments our technology works in lets us plan and think about what features we can add to make your life better. While we can’t customize the product for every customer, we can look at common issues and ease of use features that will help everyone.

Make providing feedback a New Years Resolution and Happy New Year!