What We've Done

Appropriate Technology

Getting it right

Druid Partners devised and built an extremely efficient and user-friendly UNIX® command processing language (shell) for the regional telephone companies. This shell enabled them to construct supertransactions on top of their existing OLTP provisioning systems. This product (the US shell) allowed operating company personnel and analysts to create programs and procedures with full database access and protections. It allowed them to marry and flow-through work on different provisioning systems. While the people using US were sophisticated in their application knowledge, they were less so in their knowledge of programming. Druid was able to work with them to find the right solution. The US shell proved so efficient and successful that one region’s entire in-house re-engineering effort was based on it. Another region did its own ISDN provisioning, and their solution was propagated to other regions. Supertransactions were used as friendly and clear specification mechanisms in requests for change to the underlying transaction systems. Druid has marketed, maintained and enhanced this product for ten years.

Getting the concept right at the start of a project can have a long term effect. The shell that Druid developed produced a strong return, over time, on the original investment. Druid remains committed to and connected to this project.