Living through interesting times
I have worked at X402 for three years exactly as of the 1st of October. When the acquisition took place last year it was quite an abrupt change. As the person with the most knowledge on the company up to that point, it meant that I had quite a lot of responsibility to initially keep the company running as it was for our clients and also to help bring the new owners and MD up to speed. I was wearing a lot of hats, trying to balance being a developer and also handling customer service.
We have come a long way in the space of a year and once Dan, our MD settled in he began making the changes to remove the extra responsibilities I had. The introduction of Project managers meant a marked improvement for our customers who were receiving better updates and the developers were free to focus on writing new software and fixing any bugs and issues.
Our customers are notably feeling the change as they feel better informed by the client facing staff who are able to give them better information. There are more people talking to clients and they are focused on talking to clients. The processes put into place mean that we deal with our priorities much more effectively.
Collaborating on a concept
I had initially had an idea for XEM CoreTM, but it was a little different to the concept we are working on now. At the time that I brought the idea forward, the company was entering into the acquisition so was not a good time for any major changes.
Once Dan had familiarised himself, he spoke to us about an idea for a product that was similar to mine. Together with Paul, we all threw our ideas into a hat and came out with the concept of XEM CoreTM as it is now.
The technical direction that Paul has taken is for it to be entirely based on microservices. The change means that we will have flexibility to make one product that can be used by many more people. Our clients will have the ability to choose from a list of services that can simply be switched on or off.
For us inside the room it means that we will have one piece of code to concentrate on for each service. It won’t matter who’s using it or how many customers are using it as it will be one piece of code which simplifies the way that we work. Further to this, our customers will get an even better quality of service because we will be guaranteeing that that piece of code will work for everybody.
The future of success
The future for X402 has the potential to be one of extraordinary success. The XEM CoreTM product isn’t entirely revolutionary in that others have tried to make Enterprise Management products (and there are some heavyweight competitors out there) and others have tried to build flexible solutions with microservices, but our particular take on it has a number of definite and particular advantages.
Firstly, we have timing on our side – microservices have come of age and are now ideal for the XEM CoreTM product – most of the big competitors in the EM field have heavyweight codebases that are much less agile than XEM CoreTM will be. With its microservice infrastructure it will be capable of being much more agile to the needs of customer demand, and with X402’s inbuilt expertise in bespoke code it will be easy to develop the microservices to consume tailored mappings.
Our advantage over other businesses who have also used microservices is that we have a longstanding tradition within the business of code delivery and numerous niche developments that when provided as microservices can be used by many businesses (sometimes in new and unexpected ways) to enhance their variant of the XEM CoreTM product.
The flexibility of XEM CoreTM to provide a fingerprint fit for each business by mapping the correct microservices to each business’ unique use case and enabling mappings to be managed on a client by client basis means that through time XEM CoreTM will build into an ecosystem of modular components that suit the business needs of every client.
The next Microsoft or Google – probably not – we will instead be the first X402 and hopefully being used on the computer of every working business. We want our clients to succeed and therefore our product will be geared toward client success.