Have you ever wondered how biogenesis or the evolution of life happened? There are 6 elements called the biogenic elements. These are carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, sulfur, hydrogen and phosphorus. These six represent about 99% of the composition of all the atoms in a living cell, including proteins, nucleic acids, and cell membranes. Life does need these six elements, but it only works if the elements have combined into molecules. Let’s consider what happens if we put two or more of the elements together in a compound. Carbon and hydrogen, for instance, become hydrocarbons, and the hydrocarbon chains in cell membranes are an essential component of life and also provide the energy to sustain life in the form of fuel. A combination of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen yields carbohydrates like sugar and cellulose. Five elements—carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen and sulfur from the amino acids of proteins, and if we exchange phosphorus for sulfur five elements also compose nucleic acids like DNA. And then there is the combination of oxygen and hydrogen to form the compound that makes earth so suitable for life, water.

But why, you wonder, is a technopreneur talking Biology & Chemistry in the blog.

This is because this stitching of resources to make newer and better resources is not limited to abiogenesis. As Mark Twain said, “There is no such thing as a NEW IDEA. It is impossible. We simply take a lot of old ideas and put them into a sort of mental kaleidoscope. We give them a turn and they make new and curious combinations. We keep on turning and making new combinations indefinitely, but they are the same old pieces of coloured glass that have been in use through all the ages.”

When two ideas are combined to form a new one, two plus two does not need to be four, it can be redefined to mean five. Combining two minor inventions – the coin punch and the winepress – gave birth to the mighty printing press.

The trick is to take a product and make it work in an absurd way. Trevor Bayliss is the English inventor who conceived the clockwork radio. What a strange combination! Radios need electricity and clockwork mechanical. Surely batteries or mains electricity are better ways to power a radio. However, in the developing world batteries are expensive and mains electricity is unreliable. Bayliss built a reliable radio that people could wind up by hand. It transformed the availability of information in many of the poorest regions of the Earth.

Similarly, when it comes to startups and businesses, a lot of the ideas are a kaleidoscope of multiple ideas. A lot of new businesses take existing ideas from one industry and improve them using techniques from another industry.

Closer to home, when it comes to product building ideologies for software, while the world’s spotlight might be on Agile, large companies have not let go of the waterfall model for their software cycles. In fact, in a quick journey to value, the smartest minds combine the waterfall, agile and DevOps ideologies to create a system that’s the best-best for their use case that is. Because, for every problem, there will be a unique blend of approaches to create the best one.  

Why then, when it comes to building enterprise software, this methodology is not a default way of operation? Is it because there are not enough solutions to stitch with each other? Is it because we only value what we create?  Most definitely not, ask any analyst, developer or project manager and they will tell you that any problem that they have faced is nothing new and that every problem has already been solved or is being solved. The problem here could be of a mindset. When faced with a problem we tend to directly jump into building a solution rather than assessing the approach towards resolving the problem...

ProDT solves this by bringing the philosophy of nature to building software. Using a unique method that allows us to construct the entire solution in an accelerated way depending on the problem at hand.  E.g. one of our startup clients have not yet found a product-market fit and one of their requirements was to do a video integration.  So rather than building a core video engine, we suggested to the Founder, to look for a video engine.  This improved our time to market for the launch, reduced costs & the need for highly specialized skills. We blend this philosophy into our execution.

Our platform accelerators reduce the complexity of implementation which often is one of the reasons for projects to fail.  We are proud to have our partnership with WEM.io that is the key enabler for this business kaleidoscope.  We promise 5x results with this methodology, giving great & predictable results every time with each customer.

But why us? If technology building is just a process of stitching existing technologies, surely anyone can do it, right? Well, even a tailor designing clown’s costumes make clothes right, but you would not be willing to wear them daily. Similarly, stitch and build require a certain approach and technique. For example, elasticsearch, a service traditionally used for technical logs, was used to record business transactions in one of our solutions simply because we could see that business transactions were essentially logs of a business. This approach has helped us build the required transformers. To know more about these transformers and our other projects, feel free to reach out to us in messages or comments and stay tuned to understand more about our stitch and build a methodology of building software.

P.S. This article too, was conceptualized and written using the stitch and build philosophy, combining various ideas and thought processes into a new one ;)