Gap Apps are small applications built for highly specific purposes not supported by the major business software vendors. The conventional way to fill gaps in functionality is to build complex custom applications which are expensive and time consuming to create.
RealFlair has developed a radical new approach to Gap Apps that reduces the time to develop custom business software by up to 90%. Unlike other tools that claim to offer rapid application development, RFOne is not a programming language, does not involve writing code and does not require previous programming expertise.
RFOne is based on research carried out by RealFlair which led to the conclusion that all business software functionality can be built quickly, easily and cost-effectively using just eight core components; Data Capture, Reporting, Sequence of Events, Forms, Calendars, Resources, User Interface and Messaging.
Using these eight components and RealFlair’s unique ‘Trigger Driven Technology™’ it is possible to fill the application gaps by mirroring real business processes. RFOne also supports multiple methods for gathering and outputting information and provides the ideal solution to deliver the full benefits of Service Oriented Architectures (SOAs) and Web Services that allow data to more seamlessly between applications.
Because RFOne can easily utilise Web Services, it is possible to build small applets in J2EE or .NET that can be called from within RFOne to provide highly specific functionality.
The Best Guess Approach
RFOne also pioneers a new design methodology called ‘Best Guess’ based on the principle of making an initial assumption on how an application should look and work. This is achieved extremely quickly to generate an iterative development process where the application is quickly and easily tailored to meet changing requirements over the lifetime of the product.
“While levels of functionality provided by applications such as Siebel, SAP and PeopleSoft have become overwhelming, they often fail to integrate with each other or give business managers what they need,” said John Thornewill, managing director and founder of RealFlair. “RFOne provides the first fast, simple and effective way of filling the gaps and delivering a rapid return on investment for organisations that have already spent millions of pounds on software.”
To use RFOne, all that is required is a Microsoft Windows 2000/3 Server and Microsoft SQL Server 2000 platform. All user interfaces are rendered using an Internet Explorer or similar web browser via a transactional methodology. RFOne has already been used in beta testing to build Gap Apps in a fraction of the time it would take to build conventional software. These include lead tracking, staff scheduling, document management, online purchasing, event management, skills matching and interactive web sites.
RealFlair was founded by brother and sister team, John and Rowan Thornewill based on their experiences of analyzing and building software applications. Mats Gunnar Beem joined RealFlair as chairman in September 2004 and is currently executive vice president at Rabobank where he recently managed a CRM change programme with a budget of 120 million Euros which included the largest implementation of the Siebel CRM package.
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