Innovation is complicated, and it’s also expensive. FAANG companies (Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Alphabet), spend 10s of billions of dollars each year on their R&D efforts — and still struggle to bring real innovation to the market. That’s kind of depressing. If these giant companies with huge budgets struggle to innovate, what hope do we have?
You’re #CuriousAboutData, so read on!
The truth is, that this is a false dilemma. Innovation isn’t solely predicated by a budget.
In other words, if y=f(x) evaluates to a numeric representation of creativity, where x is a number of dollars spent on R&D, it would be a more or less random function. We would have to add more parameters in order to be able to predictably arrive at a desired value of y.
What are these parameters? Well, we set out to answer just that question about 15 years ago. Spoiler, we don’t have a definitive answer yet, but we’re very close. Close enough to create practical solutions that make our lives easier and pass along the savings to our clients.
For example, we have clients that require massive T-SQL refactoring — hundreds of stored procedures need to be changed. You can imagine the budget you’d need to tackle such a task. But at BitWise we found a solution.
“Why not just write a program that can take a set of rules and apply them to any stored procedure? Elementary my dear Watson!”
— How long did it take to develop such a tool?
“Two weeks, including testing.”
Or, another example, a client has few hundred servers deployed with or without docker images, all of them running a custom version of their application. How do they even keep track of them? Not to mention apply schema changes, reference data updates, etc.? Well, it’s rather simple – create a Python app that will SSH (Secure Shell Protocol) into each host, determine if there are docker images running on it and read database configuration files for each DB server and make changes as necessary. Easy peasy.
The list goes on. If you have a difficult or “impossible” problem that you want to tackle, let us know.
As I like to say – some people find problems …
… at BitWise, we find solutions.
We like people, so feel free to call or write. Humans only.
