SMCP - A Unique Approach To Business Computing

Since 1985, we've been designing and publishing business software.  Early on, we offered accounting utilities to companies of all kinds for use with ACCPAC accounting software.  For twenty-three years, these systems were always Windows-based, stand-alone programs that ran on desktop computers.  Throughout this time, we also provided consulting services for several dozen companies in unrelated industries, maintaining their networks and software.

It became increasingly clear that the paradigm for business computing was inevitably headed in a new direction.  Maintenance headaches with different hardware, the 'hamster wheel' of continuous and interdependent program and operating system updates and 'patches', dubious, unreliable, and overly complex backup schemes, nagging security issues with viruses and spyware - all these made the task of keeping up the most basic system increasingly costly and tenuous.  Proprietary licensing started to fragment so that every system we maintained required multiple licenses from multiple vendors, and often the various pieces weren't compatible.  This so-called '90's architecture' was grinding down to a sluggish, over-engineered, and grossly overpriced behemoth that gobbled increasing amounts of our technical resources, time and money.  The train was hardly moving, always broken down, but we found ourselves frantically shoveling more and more coal into the engine.

At the same time, the internet continued to grow, and devices sprang up that didn't require lots of heavy investment in 'software packages'; more and more of the work was being done online.  Smartphones didn't need constant tweaking, they connected seamlessly to the internet and just 'worked'.  The same was true of gaming consoles, tablets - suddenly there were myriad ways to compute without needing to install lots of programs on a computer.  'Software as a Service' (SaaS), 'Cloud computing', Google Apps (a totally online 'office' system) emerged as likely heirs to the old architecture.

Even though business computing is still heavily slanted towards desktop computing, we think that will change quickly.  And we're not sure exactly where it's all heading - which company will win out, what kind of phone, or computer, or tablet will command the market in the future.  So we wanted to 'bet' on something that we felt would work no matter what device or paradigm won out.  That's why we chose 'plain vanilla' HTML, or basic 'web-page' format.  It works on everything today, and our best guess is that the machines of the future will have to be backward compatible with it.

And we wanted to minimize our system's dependence on all the tempermental 'sub-systems', like report writers, and proprietary databases, custom charting tools, financial reporters, etc.  So we chose the open-source web server, Apache Tomcat.  Apache has been for years the most commonly used web server on the internet, powering the largest sites in the world.  And we chose MySQL, a famously robust open-source database system capable of handling millions of records with ease.  Heavy duty, low maintenance, simple, platform independent: these were our guidelines.

Another notorious tar pit of trouble in computing is printing - from setting up the right drivers, incompatibilities among operating systems, to different renderings on different machines, we found this area was also sapping a lot of our resources and we wanted a way out of it.

Finally, we wanted speed at all costs, and one place designers were wasting speed was on complex, stylized, sometimes even animated user interfaces and screens.  So it was an easy decision for us: use a Spartan, 'unadorned' format that loads fast, even on minimal hardware.  SMCP will never win awards for beauty, but it won't lose any awarded for sheer power.

So in 2008, we stopped our Windows program development cold - and started on a completely different course, rebuilding, from the ground up, everything we had done to that point.  That course change has paid dividends almost from the start, in terms of reduced maintenance, licensing and design costs, robustness, and flexibility.  SMCP uses NO proprietary systems, it is designed to be universal enough to run on ANY kind of internet-enabled device and there are almost NO print functions built into it.  This makes it easy to implement, easy to setup in new offices, and, as long as you can print from your web browser, you don't have to install or set up anything special to use this program.

So it won't look like your grandmother's business software, but it won't waste your time or your money getting you just what you need to 'control' your business from the electronic device of your choosing.