N-Cycles Newsletter - First Quarter 2002

2001 was certainly turbulent and even heart-wrenching at times. More than anything else, we were reminded of what was truly important in life and of America's immensely deep strength of character. Despite a recession and the horrible events of September 11, United States productivity rose an impressive 1.8% (WSJ 1/07/2002). More than any other single fact, the growth in productivity shows the resilience of our economy and the benefits of technology. While the hype of the late 90's grew into "irrational exuberance," the fundamental impact of technology investment on improving productivity was and continues to be very real. Smart companies have always distinguished between chasing a fad, and rationally investing in new tools to improve their competitive position. The IT manager should not be choosing whether to invest in new applications, but what application investments best support the organization's strategy.

Looking Forward to 2002
All of us at N-Cycles are looking forward to another exciting year helping clients strengthen their competitive position by developing solidly engineered, custom software systems. Be sure to stay in contact with us and check our website regularly for more news. Some of our plans for the New Year include:

• Maintaining and improving the quality of our work on every client project by using AppOnTap and taking advantage of our team's expertise. AppOnTap is our proprietary code generation toolset that has already proven to increase quality and decrease time on projects.
• Providing in-depth look at new technologies and techniques through additional Whitepapers. Topics will include Choosing a Development Methodology, Thick vs. Thin: Is a Hybrid Even Better?, as well as others yet to be announced.
• Looking at ways of growing our highly talented team through selective hiring or acquiring a smaller specialty development practice.
• Speaking at group meetings and potentially conducting our own workshop on a topic to be determined.
• Exploring additional partnership relationships that would increase our value to clients.
• Responding to client feedback to improve in any other area of interest. Please let us know if we can do anything to improve in any area or add an additional source of value for your organization.

Reflecting on 2001
Some of our brightest moments occurred when:

• WebDBA launched and proved itself as a pro-active service to help companies more cost-effectively avoid system downtime before a critical problem occurred.
• We delivered a complete custom SFA/CRM within six months, on time, and ready for production use.
• We helped prove that a slim Java Servlet based architecture on clustered Linux servers provided superior cost/performance and flexibility as compared to the elaborate proprietary fat application server approaches then in vogue.
• Our architects implemented a highly flexible approach to document generation based on XML in order to construct complex documents on the fly in any format including Acrobat and MS Word.
• We pioneered semi-thin applications to solve shortcomings in pure thin and pure thick applications. The approach included building an open transactional data-synchronization engine using compressed XML data to allow offline and online data transfer; bundling automatic code updates; using server side validation whenever possible; and using a pure web interface for reports.
• Exploring real uses for Palm/PocketPC based applications.
• Our CTO, Robert Amy was asked to speak at several industry events including the Nashville Oracle Users Group and Memphis JUG Matrix.
• The new N-Cycles website launched. It provides even more information about how we help our clients. http://www.ncycles.com