Calavista Software

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and position.

I am the former CEO of ideal Asset (acquired by Dominion Harbor)

Describe what your company does in a single sentence.

idealAsset was patent monetization marketplace that automatically matches sellers of patents to prospective buyers of patents. 

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What specific goals or objectives did you hire Calavista Software to accomplish?

• Assist us in determining the right technical architecture for our scale goals
• Help develop the UI/UX
• Take our initial prototype to a commercial grade enterprise solution

SOLUTION

How did you find Calavista Software?

• Referral
• Past Successful Experience

Why did you select Calavista Software over others?

• High ratings
• Great culture fit
• Good value for cost
• Company values aligned

How many teammates from Calavista Software were assigned to this project?

2-5 Employees

Describe the scope of work in detail. Please include a summary of key deliverables.

We hired the Calavista team to help develop our initial patent marketplace prototypes into an enterprise-class commercial SaaS platform. The help design the overall architecture, the DB design requirements, the security and data retention schemes and policies. They also built our the overall project management plans, milestone & delivery scheduling, hired the right technical team for our specific project needs. They also outlined the necessary maintenance and QA, help deskm and overall upgrade strategy.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What were the measurable outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?

Version and update releases were scheduled as Sprints, agreed to by both parties, scheudled and then reviewed on those dates. Measurable outcomes were:

Architectual plan and implementation: tech stack: hosting, security, dev tools, DB, etc.

Project roadmap

First commercial candidate

Follow on upgraded commercial candidates

In our experience, Calavista team never missed a promised milestone deadline or deliverable. 

Describe their project management. Did they deliver items on time? How did they respond to your needs?

Exceptional Project Management / Project Managers. It always felt like the PMs worked for us directly. They were regularly communicative, were proactive to new ideas or problem solving. Across much of our project development timelines, we co-officed with Calavista - offering us physical proximity to both the onsite PM team and Calavista senior management. They all had a genuine interest and curiosity about our projects vs. just doing what they were "supposed" to do for their clients.

What was your primary form of communication with Calavista Software?

• In-Person Meeting
• Virtual Meeting
• Email or Messaging App

What did you find most impressive or unique about this company?

Their flexibility to the eventual unplanned event during all development projects:

• a new client requirement...with an impossile deadline
• tech vendors throwing new versions or policies at us that required quick & efficient pivots
• unplanned outages or QA events

Are there any areas for improvement or something Calavista Software could have done differently?

None in particular. Across all our various projects and delverables, if we had any issues whatsoever, they got attended to and fixed in real time. 

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and position.

I am the President of Techson IP

Describe what your company does in a single sentence.

IP Advisory and Transaction firm

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What specific goals or objectives did you hire Calavista Software to accomplish?

• Help us design our first version software platform
• Develop & commercialized our software platform
• Project manage the overall development process

SOLUTION

How did you find Calavista Software?

• Referral
• past experience using this team

Why did you select Calavista Software over others?

• Close to my geographic location
• Great culture fit
• Good value for cost
• Company values aligned
• trustworthy

How many teammates from Calavista Software were assigned to this project?

2-5 Employees

Describe the scope of work in detail. Please include a summary of key deliverables.

Scope was to take a set of (start up) ideas around automating patent research and turn them into a commercial-grade, enterprise professional SaaS patent research platform. Deliverables including initial architecture of data management, hosting architecture, initial UI/UX designs, build core application functionality, maintain delivered code and continue developing enhancements from direct market feedback. 
We allowed the team to make recommedations and select the best dev tools, DBs, and hosting environments that they thought would best fit our needs.  Additionally, Calavista was also retained to project manage the process on our behalf. 

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What were the measurable outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?

Had regularly schedule project manager meetings to determine tactical delivable timelines and expected deliverables. Additionally, had regularly scheduled development meetings with our key stakeholders, Calavist PM and the development team members. Generally, we set first, an overall development and delivery schedule and budget. 
Once agreed, we set off on progressive, short term dev sprints to meet the project plan. The demonstrated progress is they build our solution, we were able to deliver it to market and then sucessfully monetize it for our own customers.

Describe their project management. Did they deliver items on time? How did they respond to your needs?

Best (outsourced) PM team. We chose to co-locate with Calavista because, in addition to our development relationship, they offered us office space to help launch our start-up and stay proximal to the PM team. This arrangement allowed us to see & speak to our PM as if they were a regular employee of our own firm. 
We would have our regular meetings as schedule but would also engage in impromptu "whiteboard" sessions if either they or we had a new idea to consider. So all said, response time was beyond excellent.

What was your primary form of communication with Calavista Software?

• In-Person Meeting
• Virtual Meeting
• Email or Messaging App

What did you find most impressive or unique about this company?

a) that they offered a full development, turnkey team, with a firm/fixed price that we could count on month to month (while we were out raising money); they do not nickel/dime us if made an out-of-scope requests. We operated on an easy quid-pro-quo relationship;

b) they have a very familial, informal culture and we got to know all the other local employee who would regularly dip into our project and offer assistance/guidance even though they may not have been directly assigned to our work.

c) when raising money and meeting with investors they would come to our pitches and represent our Tech & Dev team as if they worked for us - creating confidence in our investors that while we didn't have our own full time employees, they saw that we were well covered.

Are there any areas for improvement or something Calavista Software could have done differently?

Nothing comes to mind. If anything, they gave more services/guidance/assistance that was regularly out of scope of our engagement and never once thought to upcharge us for it...