A funny thing happened a little over a year ago that has pushed my development time on TotalRM into overdrive…The economy tanked. Several years ago when I started Purple Ant, my plan was to do consulting and contract work to pay the bills, until I could get TotalRM completed and released, and then Purple Ant would transition from a consulting company into a software company. The “problem” was that we did REALLY well in the consulting and contracting realm, and had so much work that there wasn’t any time left to work on TotalRM. Paying customers always win out over my personal desire to work on TotalRM, and get it launched. When the economy took a turn for the worse a little over a year ago, we started losing projects and contracts from our larger customers that left us scrambling. We did our best to maintain, but we just weren’t able to find enough work to keep us busy.
With so much free time on my hands, I was able to start working on TotalRM more and more. Around late May, early June, one of our customers that had put a hold on their project due to the economy called on us to begin talks of starting up their project again. After completing the preliminary needs analysis for their project, it seemed that TotalRM was a perfect fit for what they wanted to accomplish. We would need to develop some custom modules for their specific industry, but otherwise TotalRM would do everything they needed and more, and for significantly less than they would have paid us to develop a Line Of Business application (LOB) from the ground up. Starting in early July, I began working on TotalRM, and this customer’s implementation of TotalRM full-time. At the start of their project there were still many gaps in the functionality of TotalRM, so working on their project was a combination of working on their custom modules, and completing TotalRM. We have to date successfully completed two phases of their project, and they couldn’t be happier with how easy the implementation has gone, and how easily we can make changes that don’t require weeks or months of coding and then testing for them to see it in their production environment.
We’ve come a long way in the past several months, and with the launch of this new website and this blog, we are officially accepting applications to become a beta tester for TotalRM. Our initial release will be an “Express” edition that is limited to a single user environment. We have much of the functionality for our “Standard” and “Enterprise” editions of TotalRM already completed, but more needs to be done before they are ready to be tested outside of our group. Our goal is to begin beta testing in late January or early February of 2010. If you haven’t already done so, please visit and complete the beta sign-up form.