Software Product Development

Breakthrough understands software product development.  We have been developing commercial-grade software products for over 20 years. 

You can explore some of the product development areas that we have developed:

 

Additionally, we understand the unique challenges that you face as you try to bring a new software product to market:

What am I going to build?

This is probably the most important question you can ask yourself, and your potential customers.  It's a question you keep asking yourself even after your first commercial release goes live.

We solve this problem through two disciplines: requirements analysis and release planning.  We offer business analysis services that goes onsite where your customers are.  We work with them to understand the critical aspects of their lives or business processes that could be radically improved by automation.  We translate that back with your team to prioritized features that you can plug ionto your release plan.

The release planning process is the second tool we use to identify our build plans.  This process allows us to create a virtual "product management" function that can look across all domains of your business, prioritize existing defects, new features and sales opportunities and turn them into a release roadmap.

A flexible, full-service team

We know that you don't just need a developer or two - you need a full service team that can fill in all of the gaps in your product development engineering group.  That means senior technical and architectural resources that can be brought in as needed to assure an excellent design and software architecture.  It means business analysts and quality assurance personnel and project managers who are utilized on a part-time basis because you can't afford to hire a bunch of FTEs as you're getting the product off the ground.

At Breakthrough, we identfy the critical engineering resources you need for each week of the project and assure you that you have access to excellent, well-trained personnel to execute each critical task and then can be spun off until their services are needed again.  This ability to matrix our best talent means that you are only paying for just the hours you need of each resource and are not burning up your startup dollars in capacity you don't need in the ealry stages of product development.

Professional work products and scalable processes

Being professional engineers and cuting our teeth in the medical device industry, most of our clients utilize us for critical application development.  Whether its medical devices or high availabilty business applications, we have the professional chops to get the job done.

Innovative apporaches

You want your app on the iPhone?  No problem.  How about a java client that can be deployed on the Blackberry?  We've done that too.  Can we utilize cool Web 2.0 animations and flash widgetry to deliver exciting RIA experiences on the web?  Absolutely.

Breakthrough knocks down barriers like this every day, and we want to take that experience and turn it into a strategic weapon for your development project.

It's got to look really cool

We know there is a big difference in software you create that you pay people to use (backoffice systems, etc.) and software you create that you want people to pay to use (your customers).  One of the critical aspects of crossing this chasm is solved by elegant product and user interface design.  We don't just mean a professional, clean look.  We mean an interface that will literally knock your socks off and turn users into advocates for your product and your company.

How do we achieve this?  We don't do it.  In fact we learned long ago that excellent software user interface design, or human factors engineering is a very specific art practiced by a small number of people.  We utilize two local teams for our interface design, both have track records with companies like Apple and Yahoo, both are small, and both we have an established 3+ year relationship.  On our projects, we scope the visual design work with you and bring in these experts to work their magic.  You'll love the reult.  To see some recent examples of their work, check out some samples in our upcoming gallery.

What about my infrastructure?

 Breakthrough Technologies has you covered.  We resell hosting services from local managed services firms who have top-notch reliability and failover records.  We aggressively examine your architecture up front to ensure your licensing and scalability and security requirements are in line with your business model as you grow and scale your solution.

We even offer "incubator" virtual environments that allow you to quickly and cheaply deploy pilot web applications quickly and for less than $100/month.

Breakthrough also has experience leveraging utility computing resources, or cloud computing if your scalability concerns require you to think outside of the box when delivering content to a large audience.  We have experience with Force.com, Amazon S3 and other emerging solutions.

See our hosting services for more information.