Brilliant software without the high price tag!

By Graeme Frost, CEO Brilliant Software

We picked the name Brilliant Software because we knew that is what we would produce. As a core group we had worked together for a long time – and we had taken products to global markets ourselves that were not only world class – they were world leading.

But when we survey customers and prospects about what they value the most with Brilliant Software the first answer is often affordability. I guess it is irrelevant how clever the software might be if the company can’t afford to develop it in the first place!

We never set out to be “cheap”, but as we thought about it – there are a lot of good reasons that we are great value for money.

• We are very experienced at what we do. We have an average over 20 years’ experience and that time has been spent working on a huge diversity of systems. This means that, to a large extent, we have done it all before. Customers don’t pay for us to learn, and we have no “bunnies” to put on projects even if we wanted to. (Furry bunnies are OK, but we hate software bunnies as much as customers do!)
• We develop world class software with very little additional effort. We designed the software that is managing the business of the largest law firm in the world, software we developed is gathering world market intelligence at New Zealand’s largest company, and we have also developed software for a range of much smaller companies. Regardless of the size of the organisation, we develop our software to be scalable and enterprise quality. From a usability perspective we know what works, from a technical perspective, we do it properly from the outset.
• Our project team is small, innovative and tight, offering all sorts of savings. It eliminates an array of overheads in project management, onerous development processes, endless meetings and everyone “coming up to speed”, all on the customers tab.
• We understand that at times customers might not know exactly what they want and this is where many projects can go off the rails. A lot of finger pointing goes on, costs go up, and delays are inevitable. We start projects with design workshops and then very quickly develop a wireframe prototype of the complete system. A picture is worth a thousand words, so this is when the further requirements surface quickly. When we develop the software, we do it iteratively, so customers can start getting a real feel for the finished product early. We give them plenty of opportunities to hone their requirements, and bring in new ideas.
• We do not outsource innovative work to low wage economies. We do have rote html work done by our very experienced guy in China – but that is a small part of what we do and is thoroughly tested as part of the development process. Outsourcing the development of the “engine” of the software will normally get a poor quality result and cost much more in the long term. High quality, robust software is developed by clever, innovative people not by hordes of code-cutters.
• Most systems have at least an element of external data, and are usually integrated to other internal systems. Sometime those systems have API’s, often they don’t. Integrating our work into an existing environment is a particular speciality.
• Good software developers are left brained. They could spend days deciding what will look good on the screen and usually failing! Our very right brained graphic designer makes software beautiful very quickly. It’s just a matter of having the right people focused on what they are great at.

But, regardless, we are not changing our name to Affordable Software, Cheap Software, or any other variation on the theme!

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