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Spotlight on: Adamation |
"Once in a while, a small company creates a software package that goes up against the big guns. A David amongst Goliaths. Adamation is a small company with a handful of bright coders, and they're out to alter the face of nonlinear editing..."-- May 98, Digital Video Live Magazine
The BeOS is the Media OS. But being the Media OS means more than providing superior resources for handling video, sound, and graphics. To be the Media OS you must also have the tools that allow people to take advantage of those superior resources to manipulate video, sound, and graphics.
Adamation is a BeOS developer committed to delivering the promise of digital media on the BeOS.
Adamation offers a suite of products for creating multimedia, including AudioElements for sound effects and compilation, ImageElements and Becasso for imaging and graphics creation, and the forthcoming realtime nonlinear editor, StudioA. For developers, Adamation offers studioBuilder, a collection of tools and applications for multimedia development, and supermedia, a "media layer", created for developers interested in building add-ons for studioA.
Adamation has been distinguished with Masters Awards for their development on the BeOS, including awards for Adam, their email client, AudioElements, and ImageElements and an award for best emerging technology for studioA.
In this interview, we spoke with Stephan Adams, President and CEO of Adamation who co-founded the company with his brother in 1984. In the busy week before PCExpo, he took time out to talk about his company, their goals, and their experience developing for the BeOS.
Developer Spotlight: Tell us about the team at Adamation...
Stephan Adams: Adamation has nine full-time employees. Our strength is our experienced well-balanced management team. Mark Hall leads our software development effort. He has unique qualifications as a senior developer of applications for new platforms such as Newton and Taligent. He manages the design, scheduling, development, and release of our applications.
Michele Cooper heads our information services and operational structure. She has a wealth of management experience in a broad range of areas including systems planning, software development, and business development for such companies as Pacific Telesis and Bell Laboratories (now Lucent). I establish Adamation's direction and set policy to how we conduct business. I depend on Mark's market vision in deciding our product offerings and I rely on Michele's management wisdom in motivating and driving our company culture.
Adamation's success derives from our like-mindedness and our ability to work together for a common goal. Our work environment is respectful and highly energetic. This fosters collective dedication and trust which is critical as our team grows. As we grow, we will attract others looking for a company who recognizes individual contributions and values a spirited group work ethic.
DS: How long have you been developing for the BeOS?
SA: Adamation was first introduced to the BeOS in 1995 when we began exploring application development on the Be blue box Hobbit chip computer. We became full-time BeOS development in November 1996.
DS: How were you first introduced to the BeOS and what compelled you to develop for it?
SA: Adamation was developing enterprise applications for NeXT computers and then for Taligent prior to our introduction to the BeOS. We won industry awards and kudos for our commercial and custom applications but the work was unexciting. We began our BeOS effort by tinkering with porting our Nextstep client management application suite but this became a dead-end street in terms of being able to differentiate ourselves in the market place.
The BeOS represented an opportunity for us to reignite our passion for multimedia. We were compelled by the challenge of using the BeOS to gain application functionality not found on other platforms thus differentiating our solutions and allowing us to offer superior price performance advantages.
DS: Adamation is a very seasoned software company, especially in the world of Be developers, which are typically young companies or startups. Do you feel this has been advantageous for you? Why or why not?
SA:Having a formal software development process is critical for any size company and experience. We have refined our application development process over fourteen years. Our process starts with a needs assessment of our target market. We look for holes in the market that we can fill with unique solutions that solve particular problems. We then conduct design reviews to determine the appropriate application approach. The result of this is a design specification that become our application blueprint. This document contains our feature set and milestone schedule.
The development phase is the functional implementation of the design specification. Intertwined with this phase is the bug testing period which, is important to releasing quality software. Many companies, large and small underestimate the importance of this phase and it shows in their products. Every time we have skimped on this phase we paid the price. We now have a structured bug tracking and reporting system in place to better monitor and address problem areas in our applications. An application is finally released after it functions according to the design specification with minimal bugs. We do not add features that delay our release schedule once the design specification is completed unless there is a major oversight.
Most software developers utilize a similar process regardless of organization size and experience. The more seasoned and capitalized the firm, the more formal this process. Our process has allowed us to ship five stable sophisticated software applications on the BeOS which itself is unstable but improving daily.
DS: What kinds of projects are you currently working on?
SA: Our market focus is to deliver a complete digital media creation suite. We will have a product offering in each category of the creative process, imaging, audio, video 3D/animation. We are presently shipping two applications ImageElements and AudioElements, for image and audio processing, respectively. We also have Becasso for painting and drawing. personalStudio, a consumer version of our flagship digital video application, studioA will be available this Fall. We will also be releasing a morphing program, Boo and a media player, studioPlayer, this summer.
studioA will ship Q1 of 1999. We will introduce a 3D modeling and animation application late in 1999. The beauty of these applications is that they all seamlessly integrated with one another yet, they are powerful individual programs. We designed our suite to be open so third-parties can develop add-in modules. This added value is one of our market advantages.
We are also shipping an e-mail client, Adam. Our upcoming version, 2.0 will be very competitive with any e-mail client on any other platform. Adam 2.0 will have gaming capabilities not found anywhere! Adam seems odd on the surface as part of our product line but it adds twofold value. First, it allows users to remain immersed in our suite without having to go outside to electronically communicate. Most people use e-mail no matter their primary computer use. Second, the game playing ability of Adam is our foray into digital media content. This is a natural extension of digital content creation tools.
DS: How does development on the BeOS compare to developing for other platforms?
SA: The BeOS allows us to develop applications rapidly thanks to its clean C++ interface, with no legacy code to clog up development. The tools available are getting more and more mature with every release, especially bolstered by great 3rd party efforts, development is only getting faster.
DS:Adamation has worked with other cutting edge operating systems in the past, Nextstep and Taligent. Do you think the BeOS will be better adopted and why?
SA:There is no doubt in my mind that the BeOS will be widely adopted within the media creation community. The market shift occurring in this market due to the uncertainty of the Macintosh, Amiga, and SGI platforms has opened a window (no pun intended) for the BeOS to enter. Be must act swiftly to establish a beachhead or the momentum of NT will take over this market. Next and Taligent fell victims to poor timing and from the lack of clearly identifying their market focus. The media market is ready for the BeOS now! Be must stay focused and execute a well targeted strategy in order to be successful.
DS: Which features of the BeOS do you appreciate the most? depend on the most?
SA: The messaging model is very nice, as is the fast and efficient threading system. We also greatly appreciate the speed and stability of the file system when our applications are throwing digital media around. It's good to have such a powerful add-on architecture as well. The list goes on...
DS: Are there any aspects of developing for the BeOS that you find difficult/problematic?
SA: When we first started studioA there was no Media Kit to speak of so we had to invest resources in developing our own digital media system. We look forward to seeing what media hardware support Be increases for R4. Otherwise we have experienced the teething troubles of each new release, which has decreased as the OS matures.
DS: What was the risk/perceived risk in developing for the BeOS?
SA: Being too far ahead of the curve in shipping applications is one of our most significant risk. There is no question in my mind that the BeOS will gain market acceptance. The problem with being first to market is that you expend lots of financial resources creating products and then waiting for the market to evolve. Our overhead responsibilities are the same whether we are selling solutions or not. It is easy to be leap-frogged by a competitor when you are waiting on the market and they introduce products when the market begins to mature. They get the momentum benefit while the first wave of developers fight back from anemia.
Until recently, the BeOS has been a moving target which requires tremendous resources to keep pace with. The second and third wave of developers will have the advantage of a still target which allows them to come up to speed quickly. But, we will become a platform leader if critical mass adoption of the BeOS is achieved within the next twelve months. We can then build on our lead rather than being on the defense. Timing is everything!
A second major risk is that the market perceives the BeOS as a solution rather than an enabler of applications which solves problems. Users buy solutions to a problem not underlining technology. Adamation, BeatWare, Gobe and other ISVs will validate the BeOS as a platform of choice ONLY if we collectively deliver capabilities and performance in our applications not easily obtained elsewhere. This will attract other developers to the BeOS who are looking for new fertile ground or an avenue around entrenched market leaders.
DS: How does the Intel version of the BeOS affect your development?
SA: Be has done a wonderful job of making the BeOS portable! It took no more than a few days to fully port each of our applications to the Intel version of the BeOS. I applaud the Be engineers for giving us access to a volume platform with little work on our part. This event coupled with securing their third round of capital has encouraged my perspective of the BeOS's viability. Our challenge is to create market demand for our products rather than having to justify running solely on the PowerPC platform which is rapidly losing market share to Intel hardware in our target market of digital media. Creating market demand on top of the BeOS is difficult enough without support for the dominant hardware.
DS: What would you like to see from the BeOS in the future with regard to development and performance?
SA: Great features like BDirectWindow really open up further digital media performance for us, and it's a pleasure discovering what power such advances give us. Of course, the main development issue we would ask for is more drivers for media hardware. Happily, as more hardware vendors adopt the BeOS, we will see the situation improve.
DS: What would you like to see from Be in terms of developer support in the future?
SA: This has two components to it, one technical and the other marketing. First, Be MUST quicken its I/O, driver, and codec support in order for us to be successful. Our product franchise is uniquely designed to be scaleable from consumers to professionals. The only limitations we have is the lack of hardware support. We run the risk of being perceived as developers of low-end media applications that have thin margins without this support. It is difficult to scale up to the where profit margins are higher once you get a low-end label.
Be's greatest value is in the prosumer and professional market. The BeOS is a consumer media OS at this time but the promise is significant! We are designing for the mid-range digital media market where we have the most flexibility to inch up or down as the market demands.
Second, Be can better support its developers by more aggressively marketing an independent identity from its potential OEMs and strategic partners and by creating a retail distribution channel. These actions will greatly help BeOS community to stand out and push into the market rather than be pulled into market by the sometimes conflicting motivations of OEMs. I would like to see Be customer focused rather than OEM focused. OEMs and the Web are only two distribution channels. The Be developer community must have access to all distribution channels since not all customers buy from the Web and not all developers will have access to the OEMs.
DS: What are your thoughts on the new Be Developer Program?
SA: Be's new developer program now seems to have the structure it has needed for some time. Having a Vice President, Frank Boosman who is dedicated to the needs of ISVs is a good advocacy move. I hope Mr. Boosman hears and has the power to influence executive decisions in behalf of developers. The program needs a clearer, articulated marketing and distribution agenda. What kinds of co-branding and co-marketing program will be implement and what distribution channels other than BeDepot will be established? Aggressively allocating resources to address these areas will greatly help Be recruit and retain experienced developers.
DS:We've caught you the week before PCExpo. This is Be's first PC trade show. How do you feel about PCExpo? What are your goals and expectations?
SA: I believe that there are other more targeted shows that would have been better suited for Be's introduction to the PC community. The PCExpo is mainly an enterprise show. The BeOS is supposedly a multimedia operating system and our applications are digital media in nature. I hope this show is followed by an Expo that better focuses on our mutual target market of digital media.
In general, I feel Be should attend a number of smaller, well focused trade shows to build name recognition among their target markets and only attend large trade shows under the umbrella of its larger strategic partners. I feel Be is trying to hit the ball out of the park with its first at bat in the PC game. I would settle for a few singles in the first inning.
Our goal for PCExpo is to learn more about the digital media needs of enterprise customers. We may discover that the creative departments of these organizations, if they attend an IT show, have similar needs as our target audience. A secondary goal is to ask questions and observe how well the BeOS is received by this community.
DS:Any closing thoughts?
SA: Every fiber of Adamation's collective soul believes the BeOS represents the best opportunity for a small ISV rise above the noise level to become an industry player. Adamation does not have an existing installed base or legacy technology we have to protect. This allows us to uniquely think outside the box to deliver compelling solutions not found elsewhere by leveraging the advanced capabilities of the BeOS. Every new platform has its validating applications, Amiga with Video Toaster, Apple with Freehand, and SGI with Softimage. We hope studioA and its franchise of complementary programs becomes one of the reference applications for the BeOS.
Is there a company or product that you think should be in the Spotlight? Please let us know! Write to devservices@be.com
