Company: WaveMaker, Mountain View, CA
Entry Submitted By: 10Fold
Company Description: WaveMaker, Inc. is a portfolio company of Pramati Technologies, a business incubator and enterprise software company founded in the 1990's. The core of WaveMaker Enterprise consists of of two established technology businesses.
Nomination Category: New Product & Service Categories - Software
Nomination Sub Category: New Product or Service of the Year - Software - Web Services Solution

Nomination Title: WaveMaker

Tell the story about this nominated product or service (up to 650 words). Describe its function, features, benefits, and performance to date:

Enterprises face increasing challenges of global competition, scarce and expensive resources, new disruptive business models, social media empowered customers, governance and compliance, demanding consumerized employees, and complex supply chains. Plenty of studies (e.g., IBM’s CIO studies) have shown that the successful enterprises enable agility by democratizing decision-making and fostering innovation. Custom applications are key enablers – whether you’re exchanging information with the field, capturing and automating new processes, or providing better customer service. However, building custom apps within the enterprise has not changed much in decades.

Three emerging trends are enabling disruption in custom app delivery:

1) WYSIWYG & Responsive User Interface (UI): The explosion in use of mobile devices and in types of devices is making it more difficult to build user interfaces (UI). Therefore, a move to rapid application development (RAD) tools that enable quick assembly of great looking UIs that automatically adjust for any device is gaining importance.
 

2) APIs and MSA: This same explosion of devices has required a move to building apps with APIs enabling different devices to easily access the same data or business logic. The modernization of APIs to RESTful standards has also enabled a move towards MicroServices Architectures (MSA), where apps are composed of loosely coupled components which can be updated more frequently and scaled individually.
 

3) Continuous Delivery and Docker: The move from software delivered apps to SaaS apps has made it feasible to deliver bug fixes or new functionality instantly. In fact, the only bottleneck is enterprises’ own operations. Therefore, “Continuous Delivery” (CD) has become a big movement. Scripting technologies like Chef and Puppet gained rapid use, but these scripts grew large and unwieldy. Along came Docker to enable containerization to greatly simplify CD without scripting.

Leveraging these trends, however, is not simple. Building responsive UIs is not easy. Finding a RAD tool that can be extended and doesn’t lock organizations in is not easy. Embracing the benefits of MSA requires an API-driven development culture with tools to make that easier. And Docker is a tool, not a solution. To leverage the value of containers, you need to learn and assemble numerous technologies for orchestration, data portability, inter-container networking, etc.

That’s where WaveMaker comes in. WaveMaker solves these challenges and leverages these trends in custom app delivery, thereby enabling greater innovation within the enterprise.

WaveMaker is the leading open-standards and open-source software platform for non-programming business users and professional developers who need to rapidly build, integrate, and deploy custom device-responsive web apps. WaveMaker provides team Rapid API App Development & Deployment (RAADD) to:

a) Quickly build responsive web applications;
b) Publish, share and consume APIs for API-driven Microservices architecture; and
c) Accelerate Docker implementation for Continuous Delivery, workload mobility, and reduced infrastructure costs.

WaveMaker not only simplifies Docker management, but leverages Docker to add significant value – not only container provisioning, but container and application stack orchestration, logical container pooling, role based access control, and passivity and hibernation. Enabling easy, rapid app and appstack upgrading required us to create our own data volume layer for Docker.WaveMaker Cloud leverages Docker to streamline the deployment tasks for continuous delivery. WaveMaker Cloud also enables IT to provide Docker for its developers while still maintaining control and visibility.

The WaveMaker platform has already achieved significant results:
• WaveMaker Studio has been downloaded over two million times
• WaveMaker Cloud runs thousands of apps across more than 100 countries
• WaveMaker Online Community has over 30,000 loyal users around the world
• WaveMaker provides 30 times greater virtual machine density, 50 -100 times better performance and 80 percent cost savings (e.g., running on top of Amazon Web Services vs. running Amazon Web Services alone).

The WaveMaker Enterprise software platform is available as a virtual appliance. The application development (WaveMaker Studio) capabilities can be evaluated easily by registering for the team online trial at WaveMakerOnline.com, downloading the single-developer WaveMaker Desktop, or requesting a demo of the full WaveMaker Enterprise platform.

In bullet-list form, briefly summarize up to ten (10) of the chief features and benefits of the nominated product or service (up to 150 words).

• Fostering Innovation by Reducing the App Development Bottleneck: WaveMaker Studio, a browser-based, drag & drop, WYSIWYG, live-data Integrated Development Environment, enables non-pro developers to build their own apps on IT-approved technology, eliminating custom app bottlenecks for IT while fostering business innovation.

• Develop Once: Studio’s SmartLayout™ technology provides automatic responsive interfaces for multiple devices. Develop once and applications automatically optimize the user interface for each device.

• Accessing Secure Data Behind The Firewall: Studio is available as SaaS or as a downloadable open-source desktop version (still browser-based), which customers love because they can easily evaluate and use WaveMaker Studio with live data behind their firewall.

• Team Development & Collaboration: Enterprise Developer Network provides a team-focused rapid development environment where developers can collaborate securely on projects with version control, secure access control, activity feeds.

• Deliver Microservices Architecture: WaveMaker’s API Designer, API Gateway and DevPortal help organizations overcome complexities of delivering on a MSA