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Homegrown Kitsap software firm grows
to Phynity and beyond!
By Larry Sivitz |
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| Erika Colson of Autonomix with Karl Dight of Boxlight and John Yule of Phynity show off the ease of use of Camelot Reporting. Erika was sub-contracted by Boxlight to convert the bulk of the existing company reports (Developed using Seagate Crystal Reports), to Camelot Reporting’s WebExcel reporting tool.” |
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Imagine if Bill Gates and Paul Allen had attended Central, North and South Kitsap High Schools instead of Seattle’s Lakeside School. In place of the Seattle school’s makeshift computer lab, they might have cultivated their love of computer programming at the Bangor Naval Submarine Base. They could have customized the pioneering first versions of their software for firms like Boxlight instead of the MITS company. And Silverdale might have wound up as the center of the software universe instead of Redmond.
That might have been the case if the three founders of Phynity Incorporated - John Yule (a Central Kitsap alum), Scott Smith (South Kitsap), and Donavon Page (North Kitsap) had begun writing computer code in 1975 when a company named Microsoft was founded, instead of 1998 when Phynity Incorporated was launched.
The meeting of this business triad was right on target. John was working as head of the Software Development Division at SUBASE Bangor when he met up with his future business partners, recruiting both Donovan and Scott to work on mission-critical software. What Bangor was soon to launch wasn’t a missile in this case but a software company. The trio began a virtual telecommute to southern California, serving as a remote software development shop for Camarillo-based firm Elabor.com from their home office in Silverdale. Phynity came next.
Kitsap’s truly home-grown software development firm has actually built on the shoulders of Microsoft’s prodigious software by creating a suite of software tools that lets companies view virtually any kind of information via the Web, including the deepest data storehouses, with uncommon agility and flexibility. In the commercial “Report Writer” software category, only the older and considerably more expensive software known as Crystal Reports from Seagate can rival the digital dexterity of upstart Camelot Reporting, the name of Phynity’s principal software product.
“20% of the market are Fortune 1000 businesses,” informs Scott Smith. “What’s left open is the 80% of the market that doesn’t have the IT staff and the expensive data warehouses and associated tools, but still has a wealth of data that can help their business make important decisions, if only they could get the data out easily.“
For example, using Camelot Reporting, a car dealership could call up how many cars of a particular color had been sold by a particular salesperson, or compare the total sales of all salespersons, or determine how many cars had been sold in a month of Sunday’s, without needing to wrestle with the actual database software or call in an army of consultants. Camelot manipulates the way the data is “viewed” while leaving the original structure of the content intact. And it does it all over the Web by using Microsoft’s Excel spreadsheet as the report viewer so turning hard numbers into PivotTables, colorful charts and graphs is a breeze. The engine that makes it all work is a proprietary piece of software Phynity calls WebExcel.
Customers of rival Crystal Reports actually appreciate the ease that Camelot provides. “Our framework supports Crystal Reports running side-by-side with our WebExcel based-reports,” states Yule, “and benefits from all the features we offer, such as easy filtering and macro services.”
As the Web site, located at http://www.phynity.com, proudly proclaims, “Setting up and maintaining a Web-based information distribution system has never been easier! Test drive the online Camelot Reporting Evaluation Kit now!”
Phynity is now in the process of becoming a full comprehensive Microsoft .NET development and support shop in conjunction with version 2.0 of its software.
As Bill Gates would advise them, there’s money to be made with each new release. |
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