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I've been given the opportunity to take a service that my company does and package it to see if we can sell it (E.G. hand off the code as a functional whole so that someone else can run the service instead of us) Basically spinning off a functioning service. But I don't really know where to begin on a project like this. I'm going to keep exact details somewhat vague, but I'll fill in as much as I can and I will answer whatever questions people have as well. I work in an advertising firm in Manhattan that has been in business for almost 25 years. The office is small, with around 12 people and I make up half of the development team (That is to say myself and a coworker do all the development and most of the other technical services). We have a product that we sell as a service to other advertisers that has been in use for around three years (and is still evolving) The code base is mostly PHP, but a variety of other elements are things like Javascript libraries, web portals, mySQL, Google Maps. This is complicated by some of the functions being performed by a windows server that was recently integrated into our existing freebsd architecture. Right now the workflow (mostly) goes like this: New Project -> create configuration files for project (manually) -> create web portal from template for monitoring and testing project (manually) -> project goes for testing -> debug + more testing -> launch service (manually) I've been with this company for a little more than a year and I've provided some tools for non-technical people to get information about how each project is running, but at least half the time I'm still ssh-ing into the mySQL server to write queries to answer questions. What's expected in a product like this? What kind of support would the company be expected to give to whomever buys the rights to use this service? Is it expected that someone who purchases this thing would expect my company to simply provide them with a bug free snapshot of the working system (all cleaned up)? Or would another company expect us to buy a pair of Amazon shards, install the relevant software so that they just log in through a web portal and control it all from a dashboard? Does anyone have any experience with their company buying something like this? Or packaging up and selling something like this? I'll try to keep this thread updated on how this project goes and if (hopefully) my company manages to sell the product that I put together.
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Jan 5, 2015 23:18
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| # ¿ May 14, 2024 11:08 |
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Let me see if I can explain this a little more. The product consists of three parts; a code base that anyone could implement (if they wanted to spend thousands of programmer hours) to apply the next part, a specialized OCR the company had developed by an outside research group and the key to the puzzle, a patent to the process which is about to be finalized. Once we have that patent, which is coming rapidly, the company has several choices in regards to using it. We can try to force our competition out, but that means endless lawyer wrangling etc. The other option that the CEO wants to pursue would be to sell the patent and the process to a much larger organization so that they can use their own resources enforcing the patent and our company gets to move on into other things. So to do this I need to find a way to package up this active code into something I could hand off to another organization. I'm guessing this should be a snapshot that could be deployed on a standardized server or similar that works out of the box with an already set up example process. Since my resources in terms of ongoing support are limited (and I don't want to end up being the guy they send to support this thing and miss more interesting projects) my hope is that having something that can be quickly set up and shown to be working might go a long ways towards eliminating that kind of ongoing support. That, and documentation. Additionally, ongoing support for the OCR will have to be negotiated with its creators, so at least I won't be dealing with that.
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Jan 6, 2015 16:40
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wwb posted:I would build a vagrant vm that would build, provision and deploy the app in a repeatable manner and ship them that. I've been thinking along similar lines. Once I wrangle everything into something a little cleaner it's time to put it under glass. Thanks for the advice.
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Jan 9, 2015 19:50
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