Rather than investing premium resources on development infrastructure, it is probably more strategic to partner with an established brand and platform to give birth to a startup concept. That is exactly what Jon Vlachoyiannis, the founder of BugSense didwhen he decided to engineer a fine, service-oriented solution for the growing mobile apps developers community.
This post presents a case study on BugSense, a startup, launched March 2011, operating a bug tracking and reporting service for apps developers. This company, founded and headed by Jon Vlachoyiannis, created a business opportunity by harnessing the power of Google App Engine. Google App Engine provides application development on the same systems that power Google applications. Any system or solution built on this platform offers quick deployment, seamless scalability, and simple administration.
Vlachoyiannis claims that his successful business model evolved out of a decision to rely on the Google platform for the development infrastructure. He saved millions while his talented team of developers concentrated on creating a reliable product. BugSense incorporated some nifty features of Google App Engine into its product, and came out with a promising, bug tracking and reporting service for the zealous apps programming community.
Why BugSense?
While working for another company, Jon Vlachoyiannis, studied the potential of Google App Engine. At the time, he was toying with the idea of floating a service offering for app developers, and suddenly realized the hidden advantage of leveraging the established Google platform for giving vent to his dream! He launched BugSense in March 2011, and never looked back. He made substantial financial and logistic gains by selecting Google as his development platform, and moved forward to lead his team of developers to wholeheartedly concentrate on engineering a fine bug tracking and reporting service, that did not require any in-premise hardware, software, or support staff.
BugSense was born out of a strategic choice
Being a cash-strapped startup, Vlachoyiannis was quick to realize that building its in-house apps development environment would cost a fortune and require expert manpower to support and maintain the infrastructure. He knew about the Google App Engine and wanted to convert his knowledge into a contemplated business venture. He ardently wished to provide the large app development community a round-the-clock, reliable and efficient bug reporting service that could be deployed and managed without unnecessary, infrastructural headaches.
Google App Engine as a collaborator in the development effort
Vlachoyiannis not only embraced Google, but integrated some of Google App Engine’s fine features to strengthen his own product. Including Datastore for scalable storage of data; XMPP API to enable real-time reporting of app errors on the user’s BugSense dashboard; and Task Queue API to notify developers about lapsed bug fixes. Jon Vlachoyiannis quipped, Our customers love that we have a very predictable service. They love that we’ve never had downtime. Google App Engine has helped us accomplish this.
Thanks to Google’s umbrella support, BugSense has steadily grown since its inception. It now claims thousands of customers ranging from individual app developers to organizations. Google App Engine has enabled this service to effortlessly add to its customer base, and earn a reputation for reliability.
The immediate benefits of this partnership strategy
Vlachoyiannis and his team experienced massive savings to the tune of $220,000 per year by removing the need for in-house infrastructural and support setup, a vastly efficient product development and deployment platform (Google), and the freeing up of valuable resources for developing the bug reporting service. The other significant benefits of this collaborative effort are immense scalability to a growing user base, zero downtime, enterprise-grade quality and reliability of service, capability for real-time notifications and alerts, and extended platform support services from Google. By partnering with Google, this startup has also earned a trusted reputation in the app developers community. Managing the service on App Engine takes no time at all, since Google takes care of administration, all we need to do is check how the system is performing. Says a happy Vlachoyiannis.
