After spinning off from its parent company four years ago, Perth-based company WA Go Online has started offering a suite of business applications delivered over the Internet that can be run either in-house or by an ASP.
WA Go Online’s senior project manager Kirk Turner said the company’s philosophy is to develop a “new generation” of business software.
“Our initial development focus was that small businesses could use enterprise tools through an ASP and not have to worry about IT,” Turner said. “But this is also a valid model for big business and the software can be deployed within the enterprise.”
WA Go Online’s four main offerings are iTime – an employee time recording system; iProject – a project management application; iRealEstate – a content management system for Real Estate businesses; and iSupport – a support and bug tracking system for developers.
Development work being done now includes tying iTime’s information with a PDA so it works offline and integrating iProject with Microsoft Project so Gantt Charts can be used with either.
Turner said an “Internet enterprise” architecture has the benefits of decentralised access with centralised control.
“Our products aren’t new but are provided in a new way,” he said. “Online delivery is very good as the backend is scalable and we have worked on getting the delivery quick.”
All development is done locally in Perth using a variety of open source software.
“We develop our applications with Jakarta, Tomcat, Apache, Linux and Java, so it’s cross platform and if there is a problem with the software we can fix it,” Turner said. “We use MySQL for the database but it’s quite portable so Oracle could be used.”
On the client side, WA Go Online’s applications are accessed with a standard Javascript-enabled Web browser and Java applets can also be used.
“All applications use port 80 so there are no firewall issues,” Turner said. “People will be wary of data security with hosted applications so all transactions are SSL encrypted and all data on the server is encrypted again with a key.”
Turner is unable to name any customers at this stage only to say that a number are trialing the application suite and the German government is using it for real estate management.
“When we sell the products we supply the source code to the customer so they can maintain thesystem,” he said. “We are now looking at partnering with ASPs so the applications can be provided as a service. We’re still a software development firm but we’re at the early stages of launching our products.”
WA Go Online is offering a free 90-day trial of its applications, available at http://www.wagoonline.com/trial.html.