Advantage Group Special Meeting of Shareholders
23 June 2000
Rod Drury, CTO Advantage Group, CTO and founder, Viatx.
One of the problems we face as web developers is that each of our customers needs a site that’s just for them.
They want a site that looks exactly right, has its own branding, its own functionality and is built specifically for
that business. This means each site is built from scratch or code is duplicated, even if it is similar to the
functionality of other websites – even if the applications are the same.
This means high costs for the client and means we’re limited by the resources we have to build and maintain those sites.
We’ve looked at this problem and built a company to solve it. That company is Viatx.
What our technology does is totally separate the presentation layer of the site from the backend business processes,
meaning the appearance or ‘skin’ is separate from the business engine. We call this the Single Instance Development, or
SID framework.
With these reusable engines our ability to service clients increases almost exponentially, and we can change our pricing
model from high upfront costs to our regular monthly fee.
With this technology breakthough, our next step was to apply it to highest value business problems.
Greg and I have spent a lot of time with leading US e-commerce companies, it became clear that whether they were online
retail, trading exchanges, portals or auction sites, they all used a subset of the same group of model components. And
we’ve now built all those components.
What it means for customers is we can rapidly build, high value websites using stable, reliable, proven technology with
a live code base. Customers get a totally customised site while we leverage and invest in our common engines.
The skins can be used not only to build new sites but allow each site to develop different interfaces, such as cell
phones with WAP , or even new consumer devices like Playstation II, which will take New Zealand by storm.
This is third generation e-commerce, the first generation being static online sites, or brochureware. The second is
customised, dynamic server applications, which is the current norm. The third generation is reusable commerce services,
either accessed through a browser, or even from business servers talking directly to other business servers . This is
where Viatx lives.
We’ve been doing the R work in conjunction with internal developers at Microsoft, using XML, Biztalk and Soap technologies. We’re as advanced
as anybody in the world and we believe that we’ll have one of the earliest commercial implementations of this type of
technology.
So how do we work with Advantage eServices? Viatx works well where requirements are mature and generic. eServices does
custom development, and performs high value integration work.
Viatx builds and hosts e-commerce sites using our own third generation technology. We’ve built a full suite of
e-commerce components. This model allows us to change e-commerce pricing for the common model from project-based spend
to to a monthly lease.
And so, how long till launch? Our components are in beta testing now, we’re already working with our first customers.
We’ve set ourselves a timetable of full launch within two months.
Keep watching our Viatx website for progress.