MB Financial
www.mbfinancial.com

Besides wanting to develop a Risk Assessment system faster and for less cost, Brian Fisher and Matt McBroom needed structured documentation explaining the system design, both for examiner audits and to hand over to system support personnel. They captured this documentation by using Architect to define needed entity objects, relationships among entity objects, and data retrieval methods; and Accelerator to generate well-documented code. The emphasis on design enabled development to proceed rapidly. In fact, system development, which was projected to take 6 months without Accelerator, was completed in a month. Only 25% of the final system's code was created manually. In addition, data extraction for reporting was easy because data fetch methods were already defined during design and available for use.

Brian and Matt especially appreciated Accelerator training, which not only covered use of Accelerator, but also helped them understand the new paradigm - SOA n-tier architecture. Seeing the generated source code and 'what code lives where' was particularly valuable to improving coding practices and moving to SOA. What's more, Matt explains, "I don't typically use C#; yet I was able to get an application up and running using a language I hadn't previously used."

Significantly, Accelerator generated a positive return on investment on this first development project. The all-in cost of developing the Risk Assessment system (including Accelerator cost, training cost, and development cost) was less than the projected, budgeted cost of development without Accelerator. In essence, they were able to get Accelerator for free. In addition, they were able to meet examiner requirements by having the system completed in a timely manner.

i.c.stars
www.icstars.org

i.c.stars provides technology, project, and leadership experiences to young adult learners with the aim of developing community leaders. The non-profit education provider relies on a tiny staff - just two employees - and affiliations with other community partners to run its program and generate learning experiences for students. Accelerator is being used by students as a development tool. In addition, i.c.stars VP of Technology Operations, Eric Lannert, will be using Accelerator to build new Candidate Management and Placement Management systems for the organization. Eric explains, "It's important to automate both of these systems so that we needn't spend so much time on these non-core functions." Without the tool, Eric would not have the time to automate these systems. Eric expects that 40% of his code will be generated through Accelerator, but more importantly, that the tool will enable his technology strategy by providing a strong SOA.

Major International Law Firm

The Database & Visual Development leader here adopted Accelerator for many reasons. Accelerator provides the means to mitigate risk for doing service-oriented, .NET development, as well as enabling faster and cheaper systems development. In his words, "Accelerator provides a framework that is tangible for developers. It gives them a concrete example of service-oriented architecture." He estimates that Accelerator's built-in framework accelerated his group's SOA framework development by 3 to 4 years, and allowed them to begin developing SOA applications that much sooner. Another benefit he has experienced has been the ability to do modeling and design work faster. Consequently, he has been able to do more design iterations, and, as a result, feels that the final system is better tailored to user needs. Based on his experience with the product, he estimates that Accelerator speeds systems development for his team by 30%.