The Chicago Programming Community Welcomes the uniPaaS Jet RAWcross America Tour

The uniPaaS Jet RAWcross America tour rolls into Chicago today. Chicago’s people reflect both the pioneer spirit and the prudent decision making that caused this region to thrive and Chicago to emerge in the 19th Century as the business capital of America’s heartland. Despite the region’s image for pork bellies and soybeans, the enterprise software development community in Chicago and across the Midwest is comprised of developers from some of America’s largest businesses.

In 1990, a function point analyst at the Allstate Life Insurance Company of Chicago, Illinois performed a function point analysis of a Magic application known as the LANmark system. They validated more than 60,000 function points in the application. At $1,000 per function point according to the International Software Benchmarking Standards Group, that makes the application worth in excess of $60,000,000. In other words, that’s how much it should have cost to build this massive life insurance administration system. But because the programs were created with the application platform known today as uniPaaS, it took six developers only 18 months at a cost of less than $2,000,000. That’s a $58,000,000 savings over traditional methods. And as reported in the book PROFIT, Cybertek, EDS, and Tracor Computing had all failed in previous attempts to create the same system. Each one spent more than $30,000,000 and then simply stopped trying. Perhaps this story will bring some perspective to the idea that uniPaaS Jet is “just” a single developer version. Just think of the kind of complex applications that a single developer can create with such a productive platform. As discussed elsewhere, metadata-driven development methodologies are the key to this productivity. What does that mean? Simply that the uniPaaS application platform eliminates “low level” programming and achieves the ideal balance between simplicity and capability. Art Pennington’s well documented story about the success of Magic Software’s application platform in the annuities and life insurance industry had its birth in the State of Illinois. Three years after Allstate performed this analysis they became a publicly traded company. Today, Allstate is a Fortune 100 Company with assets of more than $133 billion. Allstate, you’re in good hands.

Across the state another mega Magic Software customer, Archer Daniels Midland (ADM), the $63 billion agribusiness giant with 29,000 employees, created its own logistics management system for its seed division. ADM has a fleet of 7 ocean going vessels, 700 trucks, 1600 trailers, 1700 barges and 24,700 railroad cars. That’s a lot of mobile assets to track and manage.

After RAWcross America finishes their meetup in Chicago they will be on to the Big Apple: New York City.

CHICAGO, IL
Saturday, January 8th @ 7 - 9 pm
Vertigo Sky Lounge @ Dana Hotel (2 West Erie | Chicago)
Contact: April@RAWartists.org / Chicago@RAWartists.org

NEW YORK CITY, NYC
Monday, January 10th @ 6 - 8 pm
Snap (248 W 14th St | New York)
Contact: Dawn@RAWartists.org / Newyork@RAWartists.org

*PROFIT (Arlington Heights, Illinois: Profit Research Institute, 2007, p. 7-8).