Transforming an Enterprise Software Manufacturer

“It takes ten years to write good software, the trouble is that most software firms only last 5 years.”

Ijonas, Caseblocks CTO

I’m reminded of my co-founder’s comment the day we started Caseblocks, or EmergeAdapt Ltd to be formal. That was December 2011.

Prior to that, Ijonas and I had spent 12 months thinking about what it meant to take business productivity tooling to the cloud. We’d both come out of enterprise software dreaming of building and taking our own products to market. The garagista vs. large global vendor felt like a challenge worth pursuing. We formed EmergeAdapt and off we went to build Caseblocks. We were babies, really.

Today marks the end of our teenage years, we’ve been through much. From having no software to acquiring a fortune 500 client and being chosen over more established players. We’ve demonstrated we can beat the behemoths by focussing on our niche.

As an adult, our focus has narrowed. We’ve matured our human and software IP, delivering claims automation for insurers as a principal focus, and order management as a secondary discipline. We’ve built the modules needed in those markets on the core platform, using the same tooling. All Caseblocks features are still rapidly configurable, helping our clients reach their goals quickly.

Since we began, the components available to the platform builder had become more powerful all over the stack. Some of the libraries we used had lost support, leaving us exposed. In 2017 we took the decision to completely rebuild Caseblocks using a more modern, robust and powerful set of components, while retaining the core value proposition.

This has conferred two strategic benefits. The first being the efficiency and rate at which we can develop new IP. The second being a reduction in stack complexity, bringing improvements in platform stability, cost-to-scale and reduced maintenance effort. The new, streamlined, hyper-dynamic Caseblocks came out the wrapper early 2020 and has since been going through testing, improvement and initial clients. The only plus to the pandemic has been time for the developers to get everything right. We’ve put that time to good use.

Under transformation it was critically important to retain our DNA. We get a kick out of helping organisations, commercial or public, perform better through the application of dynamic software. Caseblocks accelerates the deployment of custom solutions, while providing a simple and powerful platform to support ongoing change. The solutions and organisations we address are non-commodity, and benefit from having feature accelerators to de-risk implementation.

The word accelerate is highly relevant. Everything we create is designed to help improve the rate at which the change experienced inside an organisation can be reflected in the software systems used to support its operations. That applies to every Caseblocks product.

Returning to Ijonas’ ironic joke , I now understand it as follows …

If you’re fortunate to have the opportunity to sustain high quality work over a long period of time, you’ll have a great chance of reaching your goals.

Paul, Caseblocks CEO, September 2020.