Real-World Problems Being Solved With Software

To gather insights for DZone's Software Development Research Guide, scheduled for release in July, 2016, we spoke to 18 executives, from 15 companies, who have created software for their companies, as well as their clients.

Here's who we talked to:

John Basso, CIO and Co-Founder, Amadeus Consulting | John Purrier, CTO, Automic | Laszlo Szalvay, Director of Sales and Partnerships, cPrime | Scott Rose, Senior Director of Product Management, and Miikka Andersson, Product Manager, CollabNet | Jeanette Cajide, VP of Corporate Development and Samer Fallouh, VP of Engineering, Dialexa | Andreas Grabner, Technology Strategist, and Brett Hofer, Global DevOps Practice Leader, Dynatrace | Anders Wallgren. CTO,Electric Cloud | Alexander Polykov, CTO, ERPScan | Baruch Sadogursky, Developer Advocate, JFrog | Rob Juncker, VP of Engineering, LANDESK | Mike Stowe, Developer Relations Manager, MuleSoft | Zeev Avidan, VP of Product Management, OpenLegacy | Joan Wrabetz, CTO, Quali | Sushil Kumar, Chief Marketing Officer, Robin Systems | Nikhil Kaul, Product Marketing Manager, SmartBear 

We asked these executives, "What technical solutions do you use when developing software?"

Here's what they had to say:

• ParkHub – parking for large events. Robin – connecting lawn care to the 21^st century in DFW, Houston, Austin, and Miami. Vinli for cars. As well as a new system solution for commercial real estate for SMBs. Self-service access to a portfolio sign on and sign-up without engaging a real estate agent. Companies can rent out their extra office space (Airbnb for SMBs).
• Help enterprises deliver core applications as a digital service as quickly and easily as possible. Empower enterprises to succeed quickly, inexpensively, and flexibly.
• Solve IT needs and ensure clients get the tools they need to do a good job. Ensure endpoints are secure and configuration is compliant with the organization and the regulatory environment. We provide ticket and incident management providing confidence and security in the jobs we manage for clients.
• The foundation accessing the Open Source software is part of the DNA. It must be protected, maintained, and managed closely with growth of high-velocity workflows. We solve problems by accessing the product suite to protect IP and have assets that build value add. We have a lot of interaction with styles of work and help to surface what’s going on. We identify how to measure the execution of a product that’s actionable and traceable. We're able to show how are projects are progressing with execution-oriented information. We zero-in on issues hindering performance. Enterprises are transitioning from a legacy style of working together to higher velocity workflows. Most enterprises will not be able to make a full transition. We support multiple models and methodologies at the same time. 99.9% of our clients are not brand new companies. We’re moving from centralized version control to distributed version control (Git).
• Enable companies to test their applications in a “real world” sandbox without going into production.
• When building an app on Docker we make it easy to build, move, and consolidate. We show companies how to deliver an application to disk with CPU and bandwidth. When deploying an app you need to constantly monitor how to create or clone data heavy apps to optimize their performance. We help clients build quality clones and provide a sandbox for testing in a matter of seconds. When experimenting you want to be able to go back and forth between versions of an application. We offer an application, “time travel” with “snapshotting” to enable the recreation of apps for testing.
• We help build software that helps run companies. We help clients leverage software as a strategic advantage with vertical specific applications.
• Get visibility and control over the software development pipeline. You want the same deployment techniques for production and development in repeatable processes. We have a broad range of customers from mobile handset vendors, game developers, automotive, and web properties with chips inside of cell phones.
• Companies are using applications to operate their businesses. However, these solutions are vulnerable to cyberattacks at the application layer. We help clients secure their applications via a multistage approach: 1) analyze; 2) coordinate; 3) understand the issue to fix now based on the criticality of the vulnerability; and, 4) provide the solution to fix the vulnerability in the core.
• We provide monitoring capabilities in the cloud and mobile. We have clients who have created devices with sensors and mobile apps to determine when a woman is optimally ready to get pregnant. Real-time sensors on devices for real-time analysis. Predictive nature and allocation of scarce resources is where companies are going today. We’ve gone from automating paper-based processes to solving important problems. Now we’re focusing on the most intuitive way of doing something.
• We provide complete insight into the health of the app with method-level granularity. This improves software performance and feature perspective. We're always trying to move left - earlier in the lifecycle in the developer’s workstation. You need to have more granularity the farther left you move.
• We’re in the early stages of development and building software faster because it comes from a central repository. We integrate with continuous integration (CI) servers. Continuous delivery (CD) of all metadata gathered enables clients to roll-out apps with confidence and speed. The entire process is vertically integrated inside the organization. The last mile of delivery, when all the metadata comes together, is critical.
• The biggest issue is breaking monolithic code into smaller pieces. Make sure changes don’t have a negative impact on the big piece at the end. Ensure you monitor every change and understand the impact it will have down the line. The most common problems to fix become apparent over time. Get feedback earlier so you can fix problems earlier. Move from production monitoring and firefighting to improving quality with the ability to run without the cost exploding. People don’t see the cloud bill until the end of the month. Ensure code is better than before and not exploding the cost in the virtual environment. Be cost aware of the software they they are running (CloudFactory PaaS environment). The platform allows the application to scale but you don’t know if it’s scaling efficiently. You need to ensure quality and resource consumption is under control. Did we build the right thing? Are we adding value to the end user?
• Went through client server, virtualization of the data center to modernization of the data center. It’s important we provide automated systems that can scale out as we're getting bigger containers and microservices – you must have automation to scale. We solve complexity for people with the modernization of the data center and software development.
• We work with Intuit, Whirlpool, Cisco, to name a few, reducing trouble downstream with Collaborator. Philips Healthcare reduced manual test time 450%. Cisco Smart Services is performing API testing with Soap with C. We help 1-800-Flowers monitor all backend API calls with AlertSide to ensure the website and mobile web are running as efficiently as possible.
• Companies need to move from monolithic applications that have locked them into certain technologies towards smaller, more agile applications that are able to be more dynamic and handle more data in order to continue scaling and competing. We offer a full platform for integration and API-led connectivity to help companies overcome substantial technical debt and move towards more Agile methods, as well as more efficiently manage the demand to integrate a variety of systems (internal and external) and maintain their application networks.

What real-world problems are you solving with the software you are developing?