Jitterbit Vinyl Reviews

We started out doing prototyping and moved that to a demonstration application. Now, we are moving into a trial version that we hope will convert over into our running application.

It works well online and on my mobile. It is storing data in our Cloud Datastore, as well as theirs.

We are on the most current VINYL release.

We are a startup, and this product will not be for internal consumption. This is going to be a product for sale that we're building. It solves an industry problem today where there is no management of data, and it's just spreadsheets emailed around. So far, people in the industry who have seen what we are doing like what they see.

The team is its most valuable feature. The people I work with are great. They can get the stuff done that I want done usually faster than I expect.

The product is super fast at getting things done. 

I had expected a portal that can be secure and handle data ingestion and visualization. It hits all those points and that is what it's doing.

There are some acknowledged technical limitations. I was looking to do some metadata manipulation, which is very atypical. Zudy said that they will work on building me a workaround. If there is a weakness, that would be it. However, they seem to acknowledge it and are finding a workaround for me. While it may not be in VINYL, they are doing an external program to shore up the weakness.

We started using it the week before Thanksgiving 2019. So, we have been using it for about four months.

I have been given concrete examples of how the solution scales, but I'm not really worried about it right now.

We don't have any users at the moment. We have people preparing to become trial users.

I have never had to grab technical support outside of the developers

I did not previously use another solution.

The initial setup was very straightforward. They keep me aware of anything complex, but I do not have to expend any energy to deal with it.

They got a good demonstration application done for me in two months. This allowed me to get funding so I could survive as a business. The application was good enough to get customers interested. I like to say, "I would be working at Walmart if they hadn't been successful."

Today, everything is in the Zudy space. We will then migrate it over into our cloud space, which they are capable of doing. We will keep them as our prototype vendor; whenever we are working on new things, they will do that for us. Some of the actual running systems, we will probably keep it on VINYL until we run into something that we can't do.

I'm not doing the programming (or no-coding), but I'm managing the features with their architects. All the development is being done by the Zudy team. I am working on getting some developers who can augment that team, but we haven't added that yet.

I have seen ROI. The biggest benefits are:

• The speed
• The team's ability to budget
• The team's ability to stay within budget and get things done.
• We are able to experiment, and usually you can't afford to experiment much.

Compared to if I used traditional methods, such as hiring developers and setting up systems, VINYL is costing me less than half of what it would normally cost.

I did look at all of the rapid development options, like Zoho. I liked my interface with the business team at Zudy well enough that I didn't look at anybody else because they seem to know what they are doing.

This is a platform which should be considered seriously for rapid prototyping. If you want to build it yourself, at least use them to do the early testing. I would also recommend to consider them for your long-term production platform use. For data management and data visualization, this product is hard to beat. Feature-wise, I haven't run into anything that we just can't do. It accesses our external systems and processes, using them very well.

For what they have given me, the product is a 10 (out of 10).

We use it for progressive apps, especially when workflows of the past, again, paper trail, can be replaced with electronic, which is what mine has done.

VINYL has improved the way our organization functions with our paper trail. What I mean by that is that one of our process workflows was all paper-based. VINYL was taken and replaced the paper trail with an electronic trail throughout, with audits, which we didn't have before. It's made things seamless and it's more efficient, and there's an audit trail where it wasn't there before.

Has it increased my productivity? Yes, when I'm allowed to actually code in VINYL. But when I'm not in VINYL then it doesn't, obviously, and not everything can be switched to VINYL. We have to have buy-in from upper and lower management, whoever the users are.

We definitely have used the solution to bring more than one data set together. We have an IT dashboard checking system that brings together DNS, DHCP, WINS, SUS, Alertus. There are about fifteen different data sets that come together on one visual to see whether people have something installed on their PCs or not. It gives our help desk visibility across a person's PC as to what they're missing or what they have.

As a programmer, I came from a programming world, so it was hard for me to use the tool because it was very foreign to a programmer, but it's very dynamic. So if I build one panel, it can go across to the different tools, phone, iPad, computer, and I don't have to worry about redesigning it for each platform.

Only because consultants can see places to use the tool where we're blind to that because we've just done it that way in the past. I don't know if I'm explaining myself right, but when they come in they can see a need for it, or a use case for it, that we would have never picked. So the consultants have provided places where the tool can benefit us that we would have never thought of.

What additional features would I like to see is easy: drag and drop UI interface. That what you see is what you get. Right now it's very dependent on having an imagination to understand. If I put a control on a page, what it's going to look like at the end result. I would much rather have, I drag it in place and then I do the backend stuff. I would like to see it before I have to build it.

Three years.

I like the stability of VINYL because I can see them always increasing, changing, making it better. I've worked with it for three years now and what it used to be in the first year to what it is now is a world of difference. They've taken our suggestions, as users, and moved the platform in the right direction, fixing those problems and making it better. As long as they keep doing that, I see a long life for the product.

VINYL definitely has the capability to be scalable in the fact that it can be a reporting tool or an ETL tool or just bringing of datasets together tool. So, scalable across different solutions.

Since we have two of the consultants on site, anytime I have a question, they're right there and if they don't know the answer, they go right onto the forums and reach back to the home company and get the answer for me. So, it's been outstanding.

The VINYL consultants are outstanding because they can bring a visual into our organization from the outside and see things like I said, we can't see. We're blind to it and then they're able to let us know, subtly, that we need to change, and change to a better app platform, which is VINYL, to get the work done more efficiently, more effectively.

The initial setup I came into my first week with the organization, so it was already ongoing. I'm not sure I'm a good perspective on that. It seemed scattered, but it may be our organization and not theirs, and it could just be the data.

We weren't sold on VINYL in the beginning. It was brought in, it was used for something, a proof of concept, but it wasn't really utilized to its full potential.

I went to the TechEd conference last year and I saw what it could do by seeing all the other customers and that's when we really started adapting it. I came back to the office and I said, "I see you use cases that I never would have seen if I hadn't seen the other solutions in place." So, I think the TechEd is our turning point where we started really utilizing it.

I guess I would say "be open to it." And, if you're a programmer, don't look at it with a programmer's mind. If you're a business person or business analyst, you're going to be able to understand how the tool works. Programmers, coders have a pre-set understanding of how to code, and this is not how to code. This is how to build an APP. So you have to go into it with an open mind.

On a scale of one to ten, I'd probably rate it at an eight. It is a young product and still growing. I see it growing the right way. As long as they, the VINYL staff and developers, keep up with changes of the technology and the times, I see it growing to be better than eight, but right now, eight because of some of the limitations it has.

We use VINYL as a solution to eliminating management reports that are paper-based. We've automated all of those paper reports to be electronic web-based and on mobile applications.

The product has improved our organization's function through all of our management reports that we do monthly are now online, on mobile applications, and ready to be reviewed by executives weeks before they previously would have been available.

The solutions helped us identify where we have bad data within our organization and bringing that to the forefront so we can fix the root cause of issues that are happening. We use the solution to develop progressive apps as we are consistently iterating on what's already been developed and adding new capabilities and functionality to the apps that we're having developed.

One of the most valuable features of the solution is how rapid we can implement it, going from a design to an operational concept in a very short period of time.

We've been relying on Zudy from a consultant basis to do all of our development, and it's been fairly positive. I'd like to see the next release of VINYL have more user interface solutions to it, so that it could be a more user-friendly product on the front end for the customers that are utilizing the tool. We didn't have a solution to help automate all of our reporting in the past which identified the need to make sure that we could tap into our data sources and automate all of our reporting, which is exactly why we needed the tool.

The Zudy VINYL platform is consistent. We haven't had any issues with it going out of service or functionality where it should have been available and it hasn't been. It's stable.

I think that there are concerns with the scalability of the VINYL platform, in making sure that it is secure and being able to be utilized for long periods of time without consistent maintenance.

Zudy's technical support has been spot on. Every time we've needed them, they've been able to deliver what we're looking for.

If I were to give advice to somebody researching a solution such as VINYL, I would tell them to make sure that they understand all of the ins and outs, especially on the front end in what the user sees to make sure that VINYL has the capabilities they're looking for from a front end and customer facing perspective. To ensure that it has visuals, its ease of use, its ability to click through and be mobile at the same time as web-based. 

On a scale of one to ten, I would rate Zudy VINYL about a seven. I'm not too familiar with it yet to give it a more solid rating. 

We're able to develop things quickly, but at the same time there's been a lot of issues across multiple pages where it should have been fixed once, and it's fixed on certain pages, but not all as we're going through the development process.

Our company works with medical devices. We sell and service imaging equipment to hospitals and clinics in the territories we serve. NXC's primary use case for Zudy VINYL was to provide a mobile field service management application that our current ERP provider could not provide to us.

VINYL has improved the way that our company functions. Primarily, the first impact was user satisfaction. The majority of our employees at NXC imaging are not in the office. They're out in the field covering the territories that we serve so prior to VINYL, they had to log in or they had to find Wi-Fi, then log into a VPN. Then they had to connect to a terminal server. Then they had to open up Microsoft Dynamics AX and then navigate to their schedule. What VINYL has given us is the ability to serve up all of that information on their phone, so now they're free to do their jobs. They're pretty happy.

VINYL has given us the ability to really improve the speed with which we deploy releases and respond to the good ideas that our people have.

Another thing that this application has allowed us to do is to bring value to the business very quickly. The benefits or the impact on the IT organization is a big morale builder or booster for us. The real benefit is that our IT organization now has the confidence to say yes to requests as opposed to no or have significant delays. The team is motivated to field requests, work on improvements and rollout changes. It's very easy to roll out a change. It takes a couple of minutes depending on the app that we're we're talking about. It's pretty easy to keep my team going in the right direction.

Prior to VINYL, we were working within a Tier 2 application that took a very long time for us to change. It's very, very expensive. Our burn rate for making changes in VINYL is about a tenth of what it was in the other platform and we can do it in a tenth of the time.

Comparing where we've been to where we are now in terms of the technical platform, it's incredibly easy to make changes, and it's incredibly easy to approve. From being able to deliver value to their business from a user perspective, it's really cool as an IT leader to be able to say yes to requests and deliver them in a timely fashion, as opposed to saying no, or coming up with reasons to delay or to give them a long term "it depends" answer.

The most valuable features of Zudy VINYL are the abilities for us to rapidly develop applications, deploy them easily, and then make adjustments as we realize the things that we forgot to put in the first release or the second release. We've done eight releases in eleven months for our field management solution.

The features that I'd like to see in VINYL next would be the ability to have more control over or have a rule-based control over column headings and column labels. Depending on what we're trying to display to a user, we can put in rules to change things around, make it easier for that.

The other thing would be a more sophisticated workflow engine. I'm an ex-Nintex user, and having a more graphical user interface to be able to build complex workflows would be really good.

The stability of VINYL is pretty amazing. It just works.

The scalability of VINYL is what I'm counting on. The licensing model is amazing for us, to be able to do as many apps as we can for the cost that we're paying and not have to worry about the per-user cost going up. We are planning on replacing our entire ERP platform with VINYL apps, building the things that we need that we can't buy off the shelf.

The tech support at Zudy is top notch. They are a bunch of talented people who are very responsive and we've not had any significant business interruption since going live with our first app last year.

I knew that we had to make a change in our ERP platform. I was brought in to NXC Imaging to evaluate what was going on with their ERP solution. They were having all kinds of issues with their Microsoft Dynamics AX solution. It took me about two months to understand what had happened, and I immediately recognized that we needed to go down a different path.

We needed to change our strategy of staying with a Tier 1 or Tier 2 platform. What we do is unique and there isn't software that we can buy. I knew that we needed to invest in a no- code, or low-code application development platform that would give us rapid development capabilities. I've had experience with other platforms in the past, so it was a pretty easy decision for me to go after getting board approval to make this happen.

Installing and getting Zudy up and running was very easy from an infrastructure point of view. What was unique about us is that we were their first Dynamics AX integration. They had not done AX before, so it took them about three days to figure out the business connectors and the data model, and from there we were rolling.

The team that we used, and are using, to build our apps is Zudy. They've been a great group to work with; very talented, very flexible, very responsive, and they're just a good group of guys.

VINYL has affected our user productivity in many ways. The most measurable is the amount of time that our field engineers were spending feeding our old ERP system data. I can guess that every FE, and we've got more than fifty in our company, has got an extra hour of their day back not having to deal with the connectivity and all the different transactions that they're doing. The ability to interface with the apps on their phone has made their lives significantly better.

Another thing from an IT perspective, what VINYL has given us is the ability to reestablish confidence in our user base. Our people recognize the difference in VINYL versus before VINYL, and they really, really like the VINYL experience better than anything else they've had in the past.

The VINYL platform with the Zudy development team has allowed us to be significantly more responsive to the business as they come up with ideas or we needed to make process changes. Business process changes are evolving all the time, new markets, new technologies. I would say that the speed of the improvement in iterations is tenfold. We can do things 10 times faster in VINYL than we could in Dynamics AX at a tenth of the cost. Fixes that would take our old service provider weeks and months to do, can take five minutes.

The value for us with VINYL is that we've got one fee that we're paying per year and we can deploy and build as many apps and bring in as many users as we need. It's a big change from the Microsoft Dynamics AX model, where we have per-user fees, and in order for us to provide or to get access for our users, internal or external, it's a per-user fee. The value proposition is incredible. What they're giving us for functionality and the ability to do the things that we need to do, they're exceeding my expectations.

Our decision criteria were really based on opportunity and timelines, so I didn't have a lot of other people on our shortlist. OutSystems was one that I had had experience within the past, but their platform didn't really fit what we needed to do. I had some relationships with some folks at Zudy and the speed of trust happened; it didn't take us very long.

We were at the TechEd last year as a prospect. It was about a month after that we signed up, and eleven weeks later they delivered a proof of concept that our current ERP solution provider couldn't do in three years.

If I knew of anybody that was out considering an investment in a low-code or a no-code development platform, I would encourage them to call me and let's have a conversation about how VINYL has changed my ability to lead at IT and it's changed NXC Imaging's ability to run their business.

On a scale from one to ten, I think Zudy VINYL is a nine. It's not quite a ten because it doesn't do everything and it can't write itself, but we've been able to do more things in the last eleven months to make our company run better than previous organizations and teams and applications did in the previous four years.

Our primary use case involves transitioning work that has traditionally been done on spreadsheets. We've used VINYL to connect different systems — especially pulling data from multiple places. Our primary system, as well as just some worksheets that are out there, we were able to pull that all in and view statistics about different things from different places all in one nice view.

An excellent example of the way Zudy VINYL has improved our business is that we can now report on the actual cost of moving a load. We didn't have all that data because it was in too many different places so that we couldn't do a good report without a lot of manual effort. Now it's straightforward. We get a simple report, and this is how much it costs to move this load. And then from that, we can determine profitability. We can now report quickly on the cost of loads. Pulling in costs, for example, such as doing the cost to get a permit if it's an oversized load. We now can roll that in with the rest of the cost of paying the driver and the fuel and whatnot.  

VINYL has improved our ability to deploy apps quickly. If you're talking about some of the things that used to take weeks to accomplish, we can now do them in days. The projects that would take months, now we're looking at weeks.

VINYL has spawned a whole new section of our IT business. It hasn't really focused it, but it's created new ones. Whereas we wouldn't have been attacking these problems before, we now are because we now have a tool we can use to fix things.

There are two most valuable features: one is the ability to pull data from a bunch of different places and put them together. The second is the speed at which you can get a new app developed. Instead of waiting months for this new app to come out, if you have an internal team putting it together, you can roll it out in weeks. I've even seen days. It's incredible how fast you can make changes.

Some new features I'd like to see is visibility into running jobs so that we can see what the status is, or that it's not stuck in its process and doing its thing, or how much longer it's going to take. I'd also like to see a native calendar function so we can put calendars into our apps with maybe even recurring tasks or appointments and that sort of thing. We'd also like to see multi-select lists. The users being able to pick multiple things to filter on and get a list and be able to export that list.

The solution's very stable. We haven't had any major hiccups, downtime or outages with it. We've thrown some things at it. If you get a circular job that's kind of stuck in itself you might have a problem, but that's more the fault of the developer as opposed to the platform.

We're about a year into using the solution. The scalability isn't something we've pushed. We're tipping our toe in the water right now but it's meeting our needs for sure. As much as we've needed to, it's scaled up to it. We can make the solution as big as we want to make it. We're not constrained by a per-user licensing cost or any of those other restrictions as I mentioned.

Tech support has been great for this company. Any problems we've had, we've gotten prompt responses. Tech support for it is top notch. We got some help from Zudy regarding building our first app. They mostly built the first app, and it was rock solid. I guess that's the way they like to do it so we learned some things.

Before VINYL, we didn't have a solution to do these kinds of things, so we were just doing everything manually on paper and Excel.

The primary symptom that made us realize we needed something was that a lot of folks were doing their work in Excel, and we had data in all different places. One person had a spreadsheet here; another person was using a Google Doc. It was just all over the place. When the data's there, you can't get to it, and you can't report on it. It was pretty evident to us that we needed to do something and let's bring this data into one central place.

We chose VINYL because of the subscription model. It was easier to get into as opposed to a big purchase. The competing products didn't have as many features. They offered a complete software package that was already configured, and then you would customize it. Whereas with VINYL, you can take baby steps to get to where you want to go. Do a little piece at a time. Take one issue, take one problem, fix that, and then as it gradually grows into a full solution, rather than trying to fit this huge solution in all at once.

The initial setup was not that complicated. It was basically no more complicated than setting up any web app would be. I wouldn't say it was any more or less than what you would expect.

The licensing costs we pay are, around $5,000 a month. That's every quarter. We've been doing it for about a year now, and the prices have remained steady. We feel it's a reasonable cost for what we're getting because it's unlimited users. It's as big as you want to make it, you're not constrained by a per-user licensing cost or any of those other restrictions, so that's going to stifle your development.

VINYL has increased user satisfaction. We're bringing the users and getting them involved in the development process. We're making fewer mistakes in the process, and we're also getting them excited about it because they can see what's happening and they have their input. It's the features they want, not what IT thinks they want. They get more excited about it.

Our iterations are faster. With VINYL you're talking days or weeks potentially.

Another piece of advice I would give to a colleague researching for a software solution is, if you're looking for something that doesn't require a specialized programming language and you want something that you can develop quickly in, and you want something that's going to pull data from a bunch of different places, I think VINYL's a good option.

I would rate VINYL a nine. Not a 10, because nobody's perfect, but it's going to be huge for us.

We actually have several significant use cases for VINYL. We replaced a few Legacy systems with Zudy and their platform, VINYL, and built from scratch a made to measure system for custom made garments designed in our stores and manufactured by our facilities.

We built an alteration platform that allows us to have customers purchase garments off the rack and then record all of the alterations needed to get the perfect fit, and again, perform those duties elsewhere.

Finally, we use VINYL to develop progressive apps by introducing new functions for our stores and giving them things that they didn't realize they needed. This really saves time and effort on their side so they can focus on what they really should be doing.

VINYL has improved the way our company does business by streamlining and standardizing the processes that are critical for producing garments and altering them, getting all of our stores on the same page with the right processes and the right options that are available to really perform for the customer. 

With the solution improving our satisfaction and adoption of associates in our stores, they have then been able to focus on the customer more, and in turn, improve and increase customer satisfaction and focus on that customer in the store.

VINYL has really helped us speed up application development at a reasonable cost. Previously and with a lot of traditional models, you're talking twelve, sixteen months before you really see the results of all the work that goes in beforehand. With VINYL and working with Zudy, we're able to really go to market with a viable product in a matter of a few months.

Iteratively from there, it's weeks to months before we have new versions instead of another six months or another twelve months for another version. So, it has absolutely sped up things by multiple factors there.

VINYL has benefited our business in a big way and we are very capable of focusing on the customer's needs when using it. One of the benefits for the store associates themselves and working with made to measure was allowing them to have multiple pathways to enter an order for a customer.

Some associates might perform their duty with a customer in one method, but something we recently implemented was more of a customer wishlist function. Whatever fabrics they're interested in, we can set those aside for them in the system. Whether they want to develop a shirt or a suit or a sport coat now, or come back in six months, those are still on their wish list along with the products that they might have selected for that fabric.

Previously you had to start from front to back every step of the way without much flexibility until we said, "we need a more flexible way". Now they have multiple pathways to enter an order, which gives them the strength or the flexibility they need to not have the customer waiting around while they're clicking in a system.

One of the most valuable features of VINYL is its flexibility. We've been able to change direction if needed, once we've learned lessons when we finally started using parts of the product. That flexibility and speed to get to market is really a strength, combined with its ability to connect to other data sources.

It doesn't need to house much data. It's really, really strong in connecting to your other systems or third parties that you might subscribe to and pull it all into one place where you can use it.

The VINYL platform is very stable. We've had minimal issues, and whenever we do, we're able to fix them relatively easily.

VINYL is very scalable, as well. We've started off using VINYL in pilot stores in the Northeast of the United States and expanded to the full U.S. and Canada. Since then, we've actually incorporated users in the Asia/Pacific market, Europe, and we're going to be expanding to China and India as well.

VINYL's tech support and Zudy's tech support is top notch. Whenever we've had any of the issues that I mentioned before, they react quickly and completely to find a solution and work with you to get it done. They understand the urgency. If something isn't the way it should be, getting it solved is their top priority.

We knew that we needed to invest in a different solution that was more flexible and scalable. We've used VINYL to replace several Legacy systems. Previously we had individual Legacy systems for Made To Measure, which was homegrown, and not flexible.

We had a different company we worked with for an implementation of an alteration system, which again, was not scalable, and did not grow with us as a company. It's those reasons that really helped point us in a direction to think longer term, and have a flexible solution that will grow with us as our business grows.

The initial setup was relatively straightforward and Zudy helped us scale how large of a system we should have, what type of license would be appropriate, and really ensure that it would grow with us without having to completely re-engineer our setup.

Our licensing costs are approximately 100K annually, and from my perspective, that really is quite the value with the flexibility and what we're getting from the product.

From my perspective at Brooks Brothers, VINYL has had pretty much every function or feature that we've needed. I'm interested to see what they do manage to incorporate on top of that because I'm sure we'll find a use for it.

The VINYL Solution has helped increase productivity at Brooks Brothers. We've been able to standardize our processes in the stores and in our factories with a made to measure solution and alterations. In doing so, we've allowed the business to not worry about those and to focus on growing sales.

This solution has increased our rate of iterations for deploying new releases from six months or twelve months down to two months or six weeks. So, quite the increase of frequency where we're able to deliver new features to the stores.

If researching VINYL versus other similar solutions, I would try to keep in mind really what their strengths are and compare them to each other. From my perspective, the strength of VINYL is clear with its flexibility and its ease of use, ease of development, and that's not to be understated. You can really deliver powerful apps in way less time than other solutions I've seen.

On a scale of one to ten, I would rate VINYL probably an eight or a nine, simply because of the flexibility and the power that it has in bringing data to one source, and then reacting to it and building an app you need with those data points.

We use VINYL for more purposes than I can count. If I were to distill it down to our guiding principles, Vinyl is utilized to fill in our gaps, whether it be from processes, systems, integration, or governance.

It has allowed us to implement processes and governance where we previously had none. It also has allowed us to peel away from large, enterprise products that dictate specific ways of doing things; ways that might not match the business need/process in place.

VINYL's flexibility: We have been able to leverage the platform to rapidly build custom solutions, and tailor-make them to our needs. To date, the speed of app creation and extensibility of the product have allowed us to solve critical business problems in a timely manner.

From a front-end perspective, the apps which we have built are intuitive to use.

The ease of use for individuals to self-serve could be improved. The solution is no-code, but there is still a decent learning curve associated with the product and some app design principles necessary before people can self-serve.

We have not encountered any stability issues.

The cloud nature of the application and the licensing model have allowed us to role out new apps to an increasing number of users without any issues.

The support is quite good through the professional services.

While this tool was in-house before I started, but a typical application build takes a matter of weeks. 

Our company uses agile methodologies to quickly prototype, build, test, and deploy our solutions.

We have been leveraging Zudy Professional Services, which consistently delivers above expectations.

I was not involved in the pricing and licensing.

We use it quite extensively within the teams that I support. There are already initiatives underway to expand to additional business units/domains.

The product can do almost whatever you need it to do. However, the "how" to do this can be challenging. Leveraging Zudy Professional Services has allowed us to get more bang for our buck using this product.

Our primary use case is for accessing data from a database.

It makes things more modular. We're able to get information from our data that we were not able to before. We can get the data faster and aggregate more easily ways and in more visible ways.

All the features are pretty valuable. One that stands out is the cross-platform integration, which helps us access the data we need to see.

It's pretty easy to learn. Sometimes the terminology can be a little tricky to get around, but it's just queries with no code so once you get the hang of it, it's pretty simple. It's extremely easy to use in getting into the IDE and then back down to your applications, and getting from your applications to your pages, and navigating through all your tables. That's very simple and pretty intuitive.

They have business objects which are essentially queries or tables. To learn the structure of their software is a little tricky at first. You have tables and sitting on top of them you have data objects which are required in order to use your application which sits on top of them. To understand how those flow between each other, and the terminology that's used between them, can be difficult.

It took about a month to get everything straight in my head. You could probably do it faster. What took so long was having not having an application to develop. If you don't have an application to develop and play with, you don't really know what you're playing with. If you had an app to make, that time could be cut to three weeks.

Also, when you are trying to delete certain columns or delete or drop tables, sometimes it will throw an error and it will force you to hunt down every location where those things are being referenced. You have to delete them from the very end and work your way backward. That can get frustrating. It would be easier, when you're deleting that table, if it would concatenate all the way down. I know that's almost an industry standard when you're dealing with tables, but it could be better.

At times, when you're in an application, and you use a "back" arrow, it's limited in what it can do. I know you can have certain pages sent back to other pages, but sometimes to set all that up is a little annoying. I'm not exactly sure how I would improve that, but you can get lost once you start clicking through tabs. You end up backing up through the same pages, back and forth, and it can be frustrating.

There are a lot of almost "hidden" features captured in these Edge Case settings. That's an example of the terminology being a little bit tricky. In those settings might be exactly what you need, but the terminology that they use is not very clear. If you want a scroll bar at the bottom, instead of having it select rows to show, you have to select Disable Panel Location Service, which doesn't sound at all like what it's supposed to do. It's little things like that. Naming conventions could be changed a little bit.

It's pretty stable. It just sits on top of your stuff and it does a good job of maintaining the connection between the two. I've never had an issue where it breaks or the connection is lost for some reason. When you're working between two different systems it's tricky but that's not really a VINYL issue, it's just hard to get two machines to talk to each other sometimes.

It's pretty scalable. We're using it across a lot of different departments and it's pretty easy to throw up a new app and start working. When we add data in it very easily handles that, and we have some very large tables. It does a good job of getting information from those tables and using the information. There have been a couple of times when it timed-out but that has mostly been due to the fact that there is so much data in there. I wouldn't expect any query to be able to handle it very quickly.

Zudy's technical support staff are great. I ask them questions all the time and they are very responsive and thorough. In most cases, they get back to us in a couple of hours, if that. It depends on how busy they are and on the question. Sometimes there are questions that require more research or maybe a phone call, rather than email. Those take longer to hash out, but they're very responsive.

I wasn't involved in the initial setup but to my understanding, it took a little bit to get started. Once they got the ball rolling, it was pretty quick. It was just a matter of trying to connect to our many databases and get them set up in a way that's usable, because there are a lot of edge cases on our end. But once you developed those it was super-easy to do the rest from there.

I haven't gone, but I know that Zudy offers free training in Boston for this solution, which I think is excellent. Maybe that's just part of their way of getting their name out there. I am planning to go in the future. I imagine it's a great resource as well, on top of the manuals or the tech support or the "how to's" that they provide.

There wasn't a third-party consultant involved. Someone from Zudy was directly involved in helping us set up.

There is definitely ROI. It allows us higher visibility into our data, which allows us to data-check faster, and validate data that we had not been able to validate, prior. It has definitely saved us money. On a day-to-day level, people are able to do their work more efficiently and that's going to save them time, which is going to save money.

We did not evaluate other options for the purposes we intend to use VINYL for. 

Initially, make sure you have a good structure for your database. It's not necessary, but it makes the integration a little easier. Once you have that, the best way to learn is just to play with it. Build a simple app. Work on building your tables. It's good to have a goal in mind. You focus on making that app, a very simple one, but one that is also working well. Once you get that working, within a couple of weeks you'll be a pro and you can be running through apps and developing on some level.

Beyond that, it's just fine-tuning those skills and learning what other features VINYL offers.

We have five people using it. Only I am really developing on it. Perhaps there's one other person developing on it. The goal is to have the majority of people using it in some capacity to replace all of their miscellaneous spreadsheets and to replace a lot of the interfaces that they're using. We want to make everything more consistent and centralized around one application that everyone can use.

In terms of maintenance, it takes two or three people: one on their end to make sure they're okay if something happens; one on our end to make sure our systems are okay, and one person to develop. There isn't much day-to-day maintenance.

I don't really have much to compare it to. This is the first time I've used a no-code solution like this. But in my experience, I'd say it's a nine out of ten. It doesn't get a ten because there are some features that seem to be "hidden" behind the terminology. The more you play with it you learn it but sometimes those features are not very up-front. It's not until you dig through the user manual that you get to understand what those features are about.

We use VINYL when none of our other systems solves the business need that's being asked for. We've used it for a lot of different things. We've got an event management application, we have a compliance tracker, previously we used it for a work-request application. We use it for custom-reporting, and we've also been using it as a way to bring together a couple different systems which we call our "Customer 360," where we can go and get an idea of a customer and all their related entities.

Since we're still primarily on an AS/400-based system, any client-facing output has some limitations using output from that system. What has been a great process-improvement and improvement in business communications - giving us really good client-facing communication - is having our Zudy applications take information from our AS/400, consume that information, and make it look nice. It turns it into something that we're happy to send out to our customers, something that's a lot more contemporary. It enables us to use a little bit more graphic design and it looks new and fresh.

One of the troubles we have sometimes is the amount of data we're processing within the applications. That can really add a lot of "laggy-ness." That's an ongoing struggle we're going to have while we use it. It doesn't happen for all our applications, only some of them that are heavy on the reporting. 

And where we can get a more contemporary client-facing output and PDF version, it's still somewhat limited as to what we can do with those templates.

We don't really have any crashes, so that's always good. You can get an error if you're trying to do too much at once, before the system can catch up. That's understandable. 

If we do find anything that turns out to be a real error, it's super-quick to go in and figure out what the error is. You make a pretty simple change to correct it. The different layers within the platform for each application are pretty linear. You've got the same three layers: the cosmetic layer, the business-rules, and your data layer. It's always going to be somewhere in one of those layers that you find the issue or figure out where you need to make a change. You're not having to really go anywhere else to do that. It's pretty centralized.

The greater the amount of data we're trying to use, the more bogged down the applications will get. It does reach a point where it's very noticeable how slow the application is moving because of the amount of data it's trying to use.

For example, sometimes it can be five minutes to refresh an application that's only producing some 75 PDFs. That seems a little slow. We've got another application that's producing about 230 reports - they're all pretty similar - and that can take upwards of ten to 15 minutes to process. One of the reports we have to access, it's our own fault that it takes so long to process because we've got so many data fields that we're aggregating together. But in general, the more data you're working with the slower it goes.

We haven't really needed tech support. Because the maintenance is so small, when something goes wrong we've got our contracted developers who usually jump on it right away. They can find and fix the problem that same day.

I wasn't part of the initial setup so I'm not sure what steps it took to get there but I think the complexity of the setup depends on what you're using it for. We've got a lot of different data sources coming together from a lot of places, so I imagine that getting that all together was a notable effort. We definitely had to work through permissions, allowing access on our server, allowing access on their server. There is a good amount of setup. I don't know how long it took.

It was us with Zudy handling implementation of the platform.

Definitely make sure that internal staff learn how applications are built. Zudy does provide free training and I highly recommend it so that you can bring all development back in-house, be a little bit more self-sufficient with it and not reliant on Zudy. From the very beginning, learn the platform as much as possible and learn from Zudy developers that you work with.

The entire time we've had VINYL, we've had Zudy developers contracted to our company, so it's actually Zudy employees who have been doing the development. I've never actually built one of our own solutions but I did attend a Zudy training session to learn how to build solutions. Our applications are so much more advanced than what we covered in the training but I can see how it all fits together. It's like breaking apart coding and development into an ultra-configuration tool.

I wouldn't say that it's relatively simple. You do have to have a developer mindset about bringing all the pieces together. I wouldn't say someone brand new could be given this tool and build an application. You do have to have some understanding of how the different layers in the VINYL platform work together. And even then, there are just so many more advanced features that you can use that really get into how we're using it. As far as anything really basic goes, even then you would need some level of training to be able to use the tool.

In terms of how many users are currently using VINYL in our organization, most of our applications have been targeted to very niche users. Originally, it probably wasn't more than 50 or so, but we've been working on soft-releases and rollout of one of our other applications for that "Customer 360" view and, eventually, the entire company will have access to that. We have close to 400 employees.

We're an insurance company so the roles of the VINYL users are anything and everything. For our event management, there's an underwriting tool and that's used in agency relations. We've got another tool used by underwriting. That department has been the primary user. We've got an application that simplifies calculations of insurance premiums for very very specific policy types. Our underwriting compliance team use it to track their filings. We have a deductible-billing application, which is one of the ones that is consuming information and putting it into a new, modern output. That's used by our finance department. There's another agency relations application we use that tracks progress of our top agents and it tracks extra commission that we can provide to those agents. And the "Customer 360" can be used by any department, mainly our underwriting and claims departments. It really is flexible.

Maintenance is very minimal. With our live production applications, they just don't break, which is great. We love that. There's zero-to-little maintenance required.

We've got quite a few applications in production now and we've got more in development. There are a few more on the list to go into development. We've still got a sizable backlog to work through.

Overall I would rate it a seven out of ten. I love how customizable it is, how easy it is, how fast it can be. The downside is that scalability and the troubles dealing with large data sets.

I'm a back-end database developer. Our primary work is data migration. We're running between ten and 15 applications through VINYL.

Up until now we have had only certain functions supported across different databases, some 50 to 60 functions. We needed an option to create new functions. VINYL is helping us to add additional logic. It's making our work simpler at times.

VINYL works across different data sources. It is very useful to be able to map the data across different data sources and different environments. It is also very easy to develop small applications within a short span of time.

In addition, it is easy to use. It took about a week for me to analyze how VINYL performs on different applications, how the logic is written inside. Its backend is .NET.

Version 2.3 has a good UI but we want a more customizable UI. 

It has given us good performance handling APIs, handling different data sources, handling different file structures, and handling email servers. The performance depends on our servers but it's quite good.

Scalability is on the database side, so it's not a problem.

Tech support comes back to us with good ideas. Their suggestions, at times, are very helpful for us in making decisions because they have been working at Zudy for a long time. Sometimes their views are different and that is very helpful. They communicate very well with us and that is keeping us on track regarding the timeline in which we want to achieve things. We're getting good initiative from them also.

We did not have a previous solution. We were in need of a good rapid application development software which could easily be handled by two or three people in terms of maintenance. We wanted something that is easy to understand. And we also went with VINYL because it is really user-friendly.

The initial setup is okay. But we needed Zudy staff to guide us on the first setup we did. We communicate with them to help stand up servers on our side, new servers like sandboxes and the like. In such cases, we will generally get help from the Zudy team. 

Overall, the setup is 50-50, complex and straightforward. The deployment took about four hours. Implementation of VINYL depends on domain. 

The pricing is moderate. It's okay.

A full-stack developer can easily understand VINYL because it covers almost all areas of development. We can develop our own code and push it inside VINYL. If a database developer goes into VINYL, he's used to a different set of rules, a different set of charts, etc. So that is different. This tool is particularly suited for a full-stack developer.

We have some 1,000 users of VINYL. The deployment took just one person within our company. Two people are enough for maintenance of the solution. For us, it is maintained by our solution architect and senior solution architect.

Our future plan is to enhance more applications inside VINYL. The current applications that we are taking care of have some bugs that we're looking into, to make sure everything looks good. VINYL is helping to implement the process quickly.

I would rate VINYL at seven out of ten. We still need some more improvements inside, as I mentioned, such as the UI. In coming versions, I'm sure this product will rock. It's continuing to develop and mature.