Interview with David Hebert, IT-director,

What was/are the reason(s) for New Hampshire Housing to look at a framework and in particular DWP?

NH Housing was at a crossroads with it's in-house developed legacy Progress business applications systems, which are used throughout our main lines of business. They were character based systems that we recently gui-ized with a proprietary graphical interface to extend their life for a while longer while we determined how to proceed with a new architecture for the future. That architecture needed to include preservation to the extent possible of our intellectual investment over the years in Progress 4GL business logic code, while allowing flexibility to build various internal client and external web user interfaces onto that business logic code.
Deploying Progress AppServer seemed to be the best route to accomplish this and we just needed a development framework to support that architecture, so that we didn't have to spend 2+ years developing our own framework and countless hours supporting it in the future to insure it remains "future-proofed". That led us to DWP.

Our business applications knowledgeable developers will be able to focus on building business solutions, while we rely on Netsetup to deliver our current and future development framework needs. step was made towards scalability and increasing professionalism of the associated companies.

Can you describe our first meeting/date? (Netsetup-New Hampshire Housing at Progress Exchange, Phoenix)

We had heard about DWP and Netsetup and had researched them on the Web and through Progress User Groups, all of which were indicating positive things about the DWP product and Netsetup company. So, we met with Netsetup staff at the Progress Exchange 2007 in Phoenix to learn more.

Netsetup staff expressed a keen interest to develop a greater presence in the US and given the deep set of Progress applications NH Housing has along with staff skill sets in Progress development, Netsetup was very interested to partner with us. They devoted significant time during the product fair and during privately scheduled sessions to demonstrate and explain their DWP product to us.

We became excited about the possibilities that DWP presented to meet our architectural and development framework needs and decided to pursue a proof-ofconcept pilot project with the product.

How do you evaluate the pre-sales phase (training, proof of concept)?

One of the unusual but very beneficial methods of evaluating DWP during the pre-sales cycle is Netsetup's Proof-of-Concept approach to convincing the customer about the value and capabilities of DWP.

After the demonstrations and q&a sessions about functions, features and requirements had been conducted we were left with a big decision, whether to commit not only the funding but the future of our applications architecture to this fundamental framework for developing future systems at NH Housing.

To minimize the anxiety of making this huge decision based only on demos, meetings and references, Netsetup gave us the opportunity at a small cost to install DWP, receive basic on-site training for our developers and then to actually build an application to prove the speed and capability of developing with DWP.
With DWP we were able to build a small Financial application, Bank Account Balance system, prooving the concept to our technical development staff, to our key business users in Finance and to NH Housing management before making the acquisition and commitment to DWP.

What is your opinion about the Netsetup way to value the advantages for your organization? (Return of investment-DEMO-workshop-Training-Proof of Concept)

As stated DWP will allow us to achieve our architectural goals of separating business logic from the UI, so that we can re-use logic for multiple end user purposes both internally and externally over the web.

DWP is a proven, successul framework for developing in the AppServer environment, which was our chosen architecture for the future of our Progess applications. In terms of ROI DWP will enable our developers to produce much more robust user interfaces than in the past in about the same amount of time, including ability to develop various UI's.

Additionally, the user experience within our DWP applications will yield more efficient screen and data browsing and updating. They will be more satisfied customers of our internally built I.T. systems. DWP will also allow us to co-mingle our legacy applications with new DWP-built applications so the user can work in one environment during the transition and conversion of all of our applications to the new architecture.

This will allow for a gradual and less disruptive conversion process. Perhaps the most important return on our investment is the effect of having a "future proofed" framework such that, hopefully, we will not have to build or search for another one in another 5-10 years, nor will we have to devote internal development resources to supporting DWP. This is Netsetup's core competence and we will rely them to keep the framework current and easy to adapt new UI's with as we go forward.

Because of the distance we both decided to apply remote consultancy. How does this work for you?

Netsetup assigned a technical support consultant to NH Housing to handle all questions and consultative assistance for us remotely. This was an example of Netsetup's flexibility and willingness to work with us as a valued customer.

We are a US based non-profit entity that needed to find a way to work with a partner located across the pond in Europe without incurring the added expense that travel would involve had their consultant been required to come on site in the traditional fashion.

The remote consulting agreement has worked well for us both from a cost and response standpoint. Their consultant has responded in a timely and formal way to all of our questions and issues along the way, using email, phone and the web.

What is your opinion about the knowledgeability of Netsetup consultants?

We have worked with several Netsetup consultants, one during the proof-of-concept phase who came on site and another afterward during our DWP implementation phase. Both were extremely knowledgeable about the product and professional and responsive to our questions throughout the learning process.

How can we improve our service?

The only signficant service concern we have experienced thusfar with Netsetup is that of late delivery of promised features in upcoming releases of the product. In the sales process 2 major enhancements were committed to be delivered in a late May 2008 release.

It is now October and we are still awaiting these feature enhancements before we can go live with DWP.

Other remarks?

Overall, our developers have said that the more they work with and learn DWP, the better they like it and agree that we have made a wise choice for our future Progress applications development framework.

It is a deep and functionally rich framework, so it takes some time to learn, but as developer familiarity increases with the product it becomes very powerful and productive.