Jitterbit Vinyl Reviews

At our company, we use Zudy VINYL to track, manage, and process incredibly large amounts of data. 

Users are importing large excel files (hundreds of thousands of rows of data) throughout the day while data manipulation and logical processing are happening behind the scenes. 

Our users do all of their work in the system we have built (with help from Zudy) and it all has to be very precise and accurate in order to comply with banking and legal court standards (the sector we work in), which it is. Many advanced and complex reports are created in VINYL for us, and it all runs much quicker and smoother than the solutions we were using prior.

Our company recently made the change from another low-code platform to increase functionality and support for our infrastructure. Zudy helped us make all of these changes and more, increasing the speed of our processes many times, as well as being available for constant support and weekly calls to ensure that our product is behaving as expected and helping to fix any bugs that are reported. Efficiency has skyrocketed thanks to Zudy. 

Reports and queries that used to take hours for us now only take minutes. In the consulting world, efficiency and effectiveness are key and Zudy has helped us to realize our visions of becoming the best in the industry when it comes to these. 

The ease of use moving around the platform cannot be understated. The main workbench page shows you the three layers you can work in (the 'Tables', the 'Business Rules', and the 'Pages') and it is very easy to see how data flows through the Tables to create the front-end panels and pages. The business rules are incredibly versatile and provide endless development tools as well. From any page on the front end, it is straightforward to click through the developer menu and see on the backend why specific data is/isn't appearing and why certain behaviors are occurring. From there, making adjustments to fit your needs is generally very easy.

The documentation isn't everything it could be, and the user forum is not always the most helpful. 

Our software is definitely making use of a lot of Zudy's 'cutting edge' functionality, thanks to development help from the Zudy team. The downside is that a lot of that functionality is not documented for users like myself (not on the Zudy team) who need to understand these functions. If these functions become part of a larger Zudy framework (which they claim it could be), I expect there will be plenty of documentation to follow.

Another thing I would love to do is be able to use SQL without needing to create a stored procedure. It seems to me that having SQL as a business object option would work as well. However, I could be wrong.

We've used the solution for one to two years.

So far, it has been very stable. Any issues that have arisen have been quickly fixed. We have great auditing features, allowing us to see whatever data we may need and how/when/why it was changed.

The product seems to be very scalable, from what I can tell.

We meet with the Zudy team twice a week to discuss bugs and enhancement requests, as well as receive updates about the underlying infrastructure and how it will affect our business. 

They are incredibly helpful and make our lives much easier.

Positive

I was brought in as our team was switching from another low-code platform to VINYL. I was told the other platform was much slower and offered much less support from a technical standpoint, which we definitely needed for our changing business needs.

We used a vendor team. The Zudy team is incredibly helpful and knowledgeable. We have bi-weekly calls with someone who has been working with us for at least one year now. 

We discuss any issues/requests/wishes with the Zudy team and they are very intelligent in how they make their recommendations. 

They can speak to the backend development logistics in ways that make decision-making for our team very easy and painless. 

They are clearly experts at the system and their ability to make changes on the fly is unparalleled. 

I was not employed with my current company during this decision-making process.

Zudy VINYL is a fantastic tool and can handle a lot of your business needs. There is a bit of a learning curve - although the training courses can be very helpful. Be sure to take and keep notes that you can refer back to as information is not always the easiest to come by. 

We have a ton of little applications that we run across the whole entire organization that help various departments get things done better. In some cases we might have been using things in spreadsheets or manually typing up emails, and we've been using a lot of VINYL applications to help eliminate those.

We host it on-prem right now. It has the ability for us to access the databases that we need to access, so it has been a good solution for us on-prem.

We've had a great ability to get proofs of concepts up very quickly, within a couple of hours. From there, we just embellish and enhance them until they get to a more robust state. It's been nice and quick to get some proofs of concept out of the door, to get user feedback on them, and to keep iterating until we get something that's really useful for the team. One example would be a business travel tracker. We developed an application that lets our employees have the ability to put in a trip request and have the hotel, airfare, and trains all specified and figured out.

The breadth of the solution’s data integration abilities through its data source connectors and API integrations has been really great. There are so many different plugins that they've created. We use SQL quite a bit, XML, JSON, and REST APIs. They keep adding different functionality and we keep taking advantage of it as we can. The more functionality that is available to us, the more we're able to be creative with our solutions. When Zudy announces a new feature, we usually keep an eye out to see if it will help spark the creative juices. There are so many problems for business that we already know about, and we're always looking for another solution to help us develop an application and get some great functionality to our customer, quicker.

Overall, it's helped out tremendously with certain departments. We have been able to turn manual processes, where we were working with spreadsheets or working manually with emails, into workflows. We're saving a lot of hours by doing that. Although I haven't run any calculations on the hours saved, it's definitely in the hundreds.

It allows us to have a ton of different interactions between the various data sources and databases, and it simplifies things for us tremendously.

We're always trying to develop the functionality and get it to the customer as soon as possible. We have a process in place where we look at requirements of the application, and then we say, "Right, this is going to be a good fit for Zudy," and we'll jump in and start coding. In those instances, we know that it's going to be the quicker product and the way to get things turned around faster.

The feature that I find most valuable with Zudy VINYL is how flexible it is. There are so many ways that you can connect data to it and there are so many features that are out-of-the-box that make the product very flexible and easy and easy to work with.

It's got a great user interface which makes it a nice looking product that our employees are able to engage with quickly.

It's a pretty robust product. I'm always impressed when they come out with new functionality. But it might help if they put out different types that would provide different ways to view the data. I'd like to see more on that.

We've been using Zudy VINYL for about four years at Collette.

I haven't noticed any issues with it. It seems to be a very solid product. I don't see it going down ever. I don't hear complaints of that from anybody. It's been a very stable product for us.

We haven't had issues with the scalability. It's scalable when we need it. Everything is done behind the scenes in the database. If you have multiple servers, they talk to them and it just works.

We have approximately 200 people using it across our organization. Employees across the organization using it have various roles and have access to certain applications. We have a business travel tracker, for example, that lets employees submit travel requests. We have tour managers, have product developers, product buyers, transportation coordinators. There are a whole bunch of different roles out there that are using the product.

It's fairly embedded into our culture right now. I would put it up there with a couple of our main systems. We have our own ERP, a CRM system and in addition to that we have a whole bunch of applications that are hosted in VINYL. Those are the primary application pools that we use.

There are so many Zudy features out there that I haven't had a chance to explore. I'm really excited to try out the new form builders and the mobile functionality. Those are at the top of my list.

Zudy technical support has always been great. They are very quick to get back to us when we have questions, whether it's answering questions, helping out and assisting, or jumping on a session if we need to. They've always been great with us.

We did not have a previous no-code solution.

We came to the realization that we needed a solution like Zudy because I was on a call and someone was proposing Zudy for something completely different. My ears perked up. I said, "I can use this for a lot of other places within the company, not just the one particular application that you guys are looking at it for. We ended up having a phone call with a few key members over at Zudy and were able to bang out a proof of concept for something I thought would be pretty hard to implement through our own coding practices. They knocked it out of the park.

We didn't really have to do a setup. The vendor came in and they did the install for us. It probably took about an hour. It wasn't very complicated. We just had to provide them with a Windows Server.

We really didn't need an implementation strategy. We set up a development server and then a production server, which was pretty close to a mirror of the development server. That way there is a way to take applications that you develop on the development server and promote them to the production environment. Once we had that path set, nice and clear, that was all it really took.

On our end it involved one or two members from the network operations team.

There really hasn't been too much maintenance going on with it. It's more like a set-it-and-forget-it. The Zudy team pretty much takes care of the maintenance for us when it's time for maintenance, but the application never crashes. It's up and running when we need it.

We used two different vendors. Zudy itself has their own Professional Services and we use another company called Zen. They have some developers who are familiar with the product, and they're very comfortable in using it as well.

We are able to turn around some applications very quickly.

The pricing and licensing of Zudy are fair. We have an annual subscription that we pay. The subscription gets us the maintenance that we need and the support that we need. They've always been great with us.

There is an additional cost if you use their Professional Services.

We looked at a couple of no-code-only options. The big one that we looked at was the Microsoft offering called Microsoft Flow.

One of the things we really enjoy about the VINYL offering is that it's on-prem. That really works with the way our company is architected.

I would definitely recommend you check it out. It's been a game changer at Collette. It's been really great to work with, and we're very happy with it.

The biggest lesson I've learned from using Zudy VINYL is that anything that you throw at it, anything that you dream up, they can probably work with it and get some kind of application going out there. They've got so many ties and tie-ins, so many different plugins, and a really knowledgeable technical support staff.

To develop an application within Zudy, it's a pretty quick process. We usually tend to design what the data fields are going to look like, what it's going to look like at the database level, and then design forms around that. That's the general process. We figure out what the functionality is going to be behind the scenes, or perhaps when you're interacting with it what the form will look like. We usually have some data that will trigger a grid and that can select other things. There's also the ability to send emails out from there and trigger workflows.

In terms of the ease of use of the solution for non-developers, I can't say that we have business users coming in and creating applications. That's typically not how we work. But we do have other people within IT who are not developers who have made applications. They've had pretty good success with it. Business units will sometimes say they need to look at data in a certain way, and they can build their own application. It's something that's pretty easy to pick up on once you get an understanding of how the framework works.

Interestingly enough, I don't really consider the code, or in this case that it's no-code, when I'm picking a solution. I'm more focused on delivering functionality for my team as soon as possible. In a lot of cases, VINYL has been able to help out with that particular functionality. And when the product is complete, it always gives us a professional looking and intuitive interface.

We're currently on VINYL 2.7 and we're looking forward to upgrading to version 3.0. The updated UI and UX in 3.0 looks nice and clean. It looks like it's really easy to use. There are definitely some differences in it, but it doesn't look like there is anything that would be too difficult to to learn.

I watched a demo of 3.0 and it looked like it was really simple to get things going with creating new forms. They've got a brand new form builder. Some process that might have taken a few hours can be done in a few minutes now. That's going to be really important when we're trying to make a quick proof of concept.

Also, Zudy continues to improve the solution's features. I love and look forward to their product updates. There's always some type of functionality that I can take advantage of. One of the things I'm really looking forward to implementing in version 3.0 is the mobile functionality. We have a mobile workforce and they would appreciate it if we could get some responsive sites into applications. The constant improvement and development speaks of the company and the product very well. I love the fact that they're constantly investing into their product and making it better. They're going to continue to grow their users and continue to grow offerings. That is going to be good for everybody. It's nice to see a company that is continuing to make their products better.

For authentication purposes, we reach out to Azure ID. We authenticate out there on Microsoft's cloud. It comes back and then we handle the permissions within a VINYL-based security system.

Overall, I would give Zudy VINYL a solid 10 out of 10. The application has been really great. The team itself has been really great, and we're able to get stuff out for our customers very quickly.

What we do is provide client management systems assistance to HUD-approved, non-profit housing counseling agencies across the country. The use case for Zudy is that we have HUD-approved, non-profit housing counseling agencies that have to report the work that they do, to HUD, in specific formats. In other words, the services that an individual in a community comes to a HUD-approved, housing counseling agency for, are reported out to HUD on a quarterly basis. That's [includes] everything from someone who needs assistance with purchasing a home, to rental services, to seeking shelter, mortgage modification, or homelessness assistance. All of that information is captured, per certain guidelines, and reported out to HUD. HUD takes that information and reports that to Congress on a regular basis. In return, Congress allocates funding to these HUD-approved agencies based on the information that they received from our client management system, mPact Pro.

Our system is hosted on the cloud and supported on the backend with Zudy through Amazon Web Services. 

We're in a digital age now, so we're just taking advantage of that more frequently now, with respect to how information is captured. We have been able to take a lot of organizations that were using paper, to being paperless. We're just leveraging all of the abilities that we have found to be easier to do inside of Zudy.

An example of a custom application we have developed with the solution are dashboards that we are working on where certain KPIs are going to be displayed, disseminated, and captured by the end-user at the touch of a button. When it comes to being able to report out the impact or the work that's being done, it's easier now for the end-user to get the information that they need, disseminate that information, and deliver that information to those that need it. If we didn't have Zudy, this development would have been doable, but it was easier [with Zudy]. It was easier to lay out the designing and planning because of their process.

The data integration features streamlined things. I saved hours and manpower in getting things done. What we've been able to deliver, on behalf of the end-user, non-profit housing counseling agencies, actually replaces a person. It allows that person to be able to focus on other things, in terms of automation. At the push of a button now, or by clicking on a certain feature, items that were on an outside platform are now automatically transferred in real time into our platform by just answering a question "yes" or "no."

The ease of use is an 8.5 or nine out of 10. It's "night and day" for our end-user, when we compare it with our old platform which was great, but clunky. Now, we have taken all the guesswork out of, "What am I supposed to do next?" You don't even have to ask a question. Where they had to follow instructions in the old platform, they basically click on the button that addresses the question that they have to ask to be able to perform a certain function in the system.

Zudy does a great job of continuing to improve features and communicate those feature improvements throughout. There has not been a week that has gone by where I have not read about, or gotten an email about, or not been able to get access to one of the improvements. It's not only through the normal communications, but also just the dialogue I've had back and forth with the account managers and the design team that had been working on projects for us. We started out with one product build, an application, and we've added two more, with two more to come. It's extremely important to continue to improve the product because of what our current environment [is]. The shoreline has changed in terms of how anybody, any organization, is going to be doing work. They're going to need to take advantage of technology and using less paper but getting more data, because that data is what is going to deliver the results that are going to be needed to be able to continue to do this work.

An example of an improvement that they've made to it recently is the ability to capture information of what, in the industry we call an "intake." A lot of organizations may still use paper, and I keep referring back to that, but now we've automated that process to the point where the end-user can deliver an access portal for the individual client to be able to get introduced to the agency, provide documentation, and for the aides to be able to follow up with the individual, based on information that they provided. That's now been streamlined. Before, this process may have taken days or weeks to get to the point of being able to deliver a solution to the clients that they serve. Now we can do it in a day.

Another example of how they've improved the process for us is in the key performance measures or reporting modules that we've requested to be built. The individual agencies can pull the reports and data at their level without having to request it through us.

Time to market definitely has [de]creased. For example, today we got off a call where we were going over some things that we needed to have delivered. By the time we wrapped up the call, they said, "We'll be able to deliver something to you. Because today we're approaching a holiday, on Monday we're going to be able to look at it, to be able to push it to market."

Zudy has increased development speed. What would take us months to be able to complete, we're getting done in a matter of weeks. I have a number of projects that we were working on that I thought that we'd [only] be able to get completed by next year. We've already completed them and we're still in the year 2020.

All of Zudy's features are valuable. In terms of the user interface, we have come upon solutions that make workflow easier with efficiencies in making things, from a process standpoint, easier for the agencies to utilize. We've taken all the guesswork out of the process for them.

In comparison to our previous platform, the speed of development of custom applications using Zudy is light years faster. We were able to deliver the first solution in less than three months. It would be a little bit less if you take out the unknowns, which I've found to be my best friend in terms of things occurring that we didn't know were happening. But even with that, it has been light years. By comparison, what took us a year-and-a-half to do on our previous platform, we did in three months with Zudy.

The low-code level of work that we can do on our own, once things are handed off to us, and the interaction that we've had throughout, with the account managers and the architectural design individuals—they have made a process that should be automated [a] friendly [process].

In terms of data migration and data connectors, they actually built a data transition table. I think it was through a platform called Magellan, that was customized for us to be able to take data out of the old platform, stage it into a staging area, and then move it into the new platform that was built on the Zudy VINYL platform. It was seamless from my standpoint, but I'm not the one who wrote the code or pushed the data in and out of the old platform into the new platform. But they made what was going to be what I called "Godzilla," in terms of it being a monumental monster of a project, easy, with the solution that they deliver.

Upload time of documents that needed to be uploaded was a request that we were having an issue with. That issue got resolved in [near] real time, within probably 30 minutes.

We got introduced to Zudy in March of this year, or about eight months ago.

It has been extremely stable; no issues whatsoever, thus far.

Zudy's scalability is one of the things that sold me. We wanted to make sure that we could deliver a product that could grow as we grew, and as the industry grows, and as changes occured. We have no issues whatsoever. 

We do have plans for increasing the usage in the future. We're working on an additional product in a project that we want to be able to roll out in the next couple of months. We're feeling really good about that.

We have over 100 organizations. Before we started with Zudy we had 65 and we're [at] 115 and counting right now. Because of what we've rolled out through Zudy, we have almost doubled in size.

We've not had any issues with tech support. We've not had any challenges to go to tech support. But, as promised, if we did have issues, they would follow up.

We get communication with the design group that we've been working with, daily, to give us a heads-up if we may encounter a problem with the process. But no issues whatsoever, thus far.

A feature that we asked for was the ability to add a document upload feature and it was done in less than a day, actually within a couple of hours. Some reporting views needed to be changed. I gave that request verbally, via a phone call. While I was on the phone they asked me to refresh my screen and it was done.

There are two-and-a-half people that we are in constant communication with. And that's mainly because of additional features and additional projects that we keep adding to the process.

Our previous platform had a development team and an agreement along with that. To make any changes or enhancements, we had to go through that process. So there is nothing to compare [Zudy] to. That was part of why we wanted to look at other options and, fortunately, we found Zudy.

The setup of the initial [deployment] was extremely straightforward. Everything that they said they did, they actually exceeded.

Getting access to it, once we agreed and signed off on the dotted line, was within an hour. Then we started working on some training that we needed to do to get familiar with the platform. That was delivered that same day. We wanted to make sure on our end that we understood what we were getting ourselves into. As a team and staff we completed our training to get familiar with the Zudy platform. Within 48 or 72 hours we were done with what we needed and we started building out platforms and applications.

I can't say the developers had an issue with any development challenges. 

My staff is small. There were three of us involved in the deployment. We're a team of three but we act like a team of 30 now, because of what we have access to.

Our return on investment has been huge. Once we switched from the old platform over to Zudy, we had an increase of organizations to now [have] over 115. That's about 55 organizations that came to us as a result of the platform switch. And in terms of demo requests, we used to get about one or two demo requests a month. Now we're getting about two to four demo requests a week.

Pricing and licensing are on par with or better than what we were looking at and what we had. That was also one of the key factors for making the decision. We cut our costs in half by going over to the Zudy platform.

There are no additional costs in terms of their standard licensing fees, but we have asked for and signed up for support services. So [when there are] some questions that we can't answer until we get more and more knowledge about the system, we have a support structure there so that we can get questions asked and answered, or time to have things built or augmented.

We just did an internet search of some products that were on other platforms and what they came along with. What jumped out to us was we had the ability to own everything that we built, of course with the support and help from Zudy. 

Without mentioning what those other platforms were, some of them are very prominent, that you hear about in the media every day. Although they were comparable, we found that we can do the same thing with the Zudy platform and the team, and they proved us right.

My advice would be to do your research. Compare what development and the timeline looks like on the big players, the other platforms that are out there which are all great. And ask yourself if it's going to be comparable and can the Zudy platform actually speak to the same things that the big boys do.

We've gotten no complaints about the functionality, given that it's a “no code” solution. We've gotten great feedback about how our new system looks and how much less stress [there has been] during our current environment—meaning everything that is going on with the pandemic and organizations being forced to work remotely. The timing was good for us to have run across Zudy, to help deliver what we believe the rest of the industry and probably most industries are going to be going to: offering a paperless solution to deliver or conduct your job.

I wouldn't say it's the biggest lesson that I've learned from Zudy, but I really appreciate understanding known-unknowns and what the unknown-unknowns are. In other words: how we approach a problem now versus how we dealt with problems from the old platform. Now, if there's an issue, we know that there is a solution that can be delivered, in short order. In the past, it was hit and miss: We've got this problem; we don't know how long it's going to take to fix it. But we do know now that if we run into problems on this platform, there's a solution that's going to be delivered. In most cases, the end-user doesn't even know that it's an issue.

The user interface and user experience are greatly improved. I haven't really heard any complaints from our end-users, but they are loving what they're seeing.

I'm really pleased with all of the deliverables and the work so far. There's always room for improvement with any organization, but I like the communication. I like the follow up. I like the constant checking in with me, and the team, on if we're moving in the right direction or if we need to make pivots or changes. And the fact that I can send an email or pick up the phone or send a communication through Slack and get instant communication [means] there is no guesswork. I don't have a complaint. I'm satisfied with everything thus far.

I would rate Zudy at nine out of 10 because of the ease of use, the customer service, making me feel like I'm a partner who is valued, and appreciating the feedback that we receive from them.

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.

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).

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.

I use it for business process automation across a variety of areas. I am in charge of commercial IT and we have used this technology to enhance some of the commercial business processes.

In my current organization, we are using it in account planning, incentive compensation, field communications via SMS alerts, and onboarding of employees.

The ability to build apps quickly by connecting to almost any data source, while having workflow and routing, really give you the ability to enhance more static systems and drive value to the business.

• Ability to connect to disparate data sources
• The workflow engine
• Speed and agility in building apps

Perhaps the UI could be improved.

There have been no stability issues. It is a very stable platform.

No issues with scalability.

The support team always makes itself available and drives resolutions quicker than we can typically keep up. It is really excellent.

Their services are excellent. They typically provide a team of resources to get the environment set up and help build your first app.

Pricing is less than the cost of a consultant and the value you receive is much greater.

We looked at other middleware products but liked the unique capabilities of this one.

Try it. Sometimes, the use cases are not evident. Start slow and pilot it and the value becomes evident.

We help residential general contractors take their quoting time from hours to just minutes. My use case for Zudy VINYL has been the full package for both my front-end, and my back-end systems. We're running all of our database information, all of our modeling, all of our calculations, as well as the front-end delivery for the customer, through Zudy .

The way Zudy has helped my organization function is that it's the first time that someone was able to actually pull off my dream, the vision that I've had. Even working with some of the guys, everybody looks at what Quote Kong does and they think that because it looks simple, therefore the programming must be simple. It's not. I've had far too many people assume that it is.

Everybody wants to say they can do it. I've tried all kinds of different platforms and Zudy was the first one that not only could pull off the back-end data modeling and the backflips and the crazy things that I needed it to do, but it could also handle the front-end well enough. It's not a beautiful front-end, but it is good-looking. I'm happy with it. It looks good. There are some other solutions that I liked on the prettier end, but they couldn't handle any of the back-end data. I found other database back-ends that could handle some of the database stuff, but they didn't look pretty at all. This has been a great balance of a good-looking front-end and all the power and the complexity that I needed to handle on the back-end. It's been a dream for me. It's been so exciting to finally get Quote Kong out there for people to start working on.

And when talking about time to market on new capabilities, it's absolutely sped me up. The last big charge that we made at trying to build out Quote Kong, we were three and a half years in development and we could not get it to function because of all the complexity. With VINYL, we were able to do that in eight months. And every single new thing that we're adding is going to be quicker, easier, more integrated. And I don't feel like I have to pull out another massive budget to try and add my next feature, because the next feature is going to be quite simple to be able to add, and I'm very excited about that.

The best thing I can tell you is that what took me three years and never did get finished—we got it close, but I couldn't edit a lot of things and I couldn't import a lot of the things I needed to. It was still not working right on different systems and different devices. It would work here, here, and here, but over here, it wouldn't. And then of course, if they opened up this browser, then that wouldn't work. I don't have any of those problems. I went from thinking, "I don't know if that is ever going to get finished"—even if I had another two years, maybe we wouldn't have gotten finished—to eight months and it's ready. How do you beat that? How do you explain the speed of that? And even in the eight months, we have more features and more things that I wanted to include in the first iteration than what we had after three and a half years of building.

VINYL allows me to be able to play with a lot of the back-end data and to link all of my databases and to understand where all my tables are sitting, much better than what I was ever able to do with any of the other platforms or the other services I was working with. I'm able to handle many-to-many database connections. Zudy explained a lot of that really well, if you take the time to do their course which was included with my subscription, although I don't know if they include it for everybody. The ability to understand everything that's out there in my system is critical because there are so many minutia and so many little micro details. I'm very excited that I get to go in and pull out all the details. Just last night, I was pulling out all the different database tables and all the connections so that I could see them separately and make sure that they were all where I want them to be. I'm very excited about that.

The data integrations from Zudy that have been able to help me automate business processes and workflows have been very instrumental for building what I've wanted to build. That is the majority of what Quote Kong is. It's a ton of automations which used to be 50 or 60 hours worth of manual paperwork, and we're able to put it into processes that substantially streamline that to down to an hour's worth of work. The future things that I want to build, anytime I go looking at the documentation, and look at doing things, I'll say to myself, "I'll be able to do this," whereas with other platforms, and other things that I've tried, we were not able to do it. This has been exciting for us.

The low-code functionality, and what I've been able to achieve with it, has been a massive amount—a magnitude of 10 times—easier than what it was previously. We tried to build this five other times, and failed. I'm talking about years of development and multiple attempts. The fact that the code is just there means that so many of the minutia are already all built out for me. I don't have to define the box, the line weight, and the size, and all the little details that I've had to do in the past. It's not that I don't have control over that. It's just that I don't have to think about it ahead of time. I also don't have to design for each iteration of iPhone, and iPad, and Android, and computer size. It just automatically adjusts. A lot of those features have been absolutely instrumental, and we've been able to add in integrations that we were not able to achieve on the other platforms. It's been wonderful.

The features in Zudy VINYL that I've found to be most valuable have been the fact that we have tried to build out several versions of Quote Kong, and the problem has been that every time we start off with a new version we always have to go through this huge rigmarole of setting up all of these tables, and all these logics, and writing everything from scratch. I don't have to do that with Zudy VINYL. There are so many of those micro, early-stage things that are just done for you.

On top of that, it's unbelievably easy to have it work on any device. I have hardly had to do any tweaking from device to device. Whereas previously, it was very difficult. Those are the things that I like about Zudy VINYL.

Also, when it comes to the speed of development of the applications with Zudy VINYL it has been the fastest and most powerful that I've been able to do. We've tried building things from scratch. It takes an enormous amount of time. We've cut that time by probably a fifth, with more power. I've been very happy with the speed of doing things in Zudy VINYL.

The custom application we built with Zudy VINYL is Quote Kong, our entire process. We compress probably 60 hours' worth of manual paperwork, and we get it done for the contractor in about an hour. There are a lot of hoops that we have to go through to make that happen, and there were a lot of things that were not off-the-shelf that I needed. We actually attempted to build Quote Kong five other times with different platforms, and it failed. It did not work with other ones. We tried. We spent a lot of time, a lot of energy, and we could not make it come to completion. But with Zudy VINYL we were able to complete it.

Zudy's data connectors and the API integrations have been great so far. We've definitely had to integrate some older data that we brought over, and it's worked really well. It also has a lot of external things such as Babel, and it also has Google integration, which has been easy. Integrations aren't easy in general, but I would say that I'm very happy with how it has been, integrating with Zudy so far.

As for the ease of use for VINYL for non-developers, I like it. I do have some technical background, but I don't have the full-stack development abilities. Yet I'm able to go in and I love that I can make changes on-the-fly when a customer says to me, "Hey, this button in this place doesn't quite make sense." I can move it. I don't have to call up a developer. I don't have to try and find somebody to do it. I'm very excited about that. It's been amazing to have that control myself, and not have to try and explain to someone how I want to move the button; why I want to move the button; what that is supposed to look like. I've just been able to go in myself and do it, and I've found it to be relatively easy. It's a very complex thing that they're trying to accomplish, so it's not super-easy, but it's also not so difficult that a non-developer can't handle it. As long as you can follow some instructions, you should be able to do it yourself.

Zudy also handles the data encryption and the user identities and the data migration and the databases, and all of those authentication things, very well. I have been very happy with it. When you're having to build things from scratch, you have to build all of that out manually, and that is a difficult thing to do. It takes a lot of time and a lot of effort, and I just didn't have [to go through] that with this one. I feel confident with what they have. My research has said they've been doing it well. Security is very hard to do. You can do 9,998 things right, but if you do one or two things wrong, the bad guys will find it. From what I've seen, that hasn't happened. Breaches are probably somewhat inevitable in some ways, but I think it's certainly a lot less likely because you didn't have to set up all of these things and know all these best practices because it was done well for you ahead of time. That's been a comfort to me because, of course, I have a lot of data and a lot of security things that I am worried about, and I've been glad to be able to rely on Zudy.

There are always micro things that could be improved. There are certain buttons that I want to have a certain feature. We can make it work, but it's a little tricky.

Eventually, a nicer way to create certain features, like the way that we create PDFs, would help. Sometimes the way that it resizes when I have multiple windows up, could also be better. It's minor stuff though. It's edge-case stuff. 

Some of them I've brought up to them and some of them I haven't even bothered because I know that what I'd be asking for is very specific to me. It's not that I won't ask. I will in the future, but it's not worth my time right now. 

They're always looking for ways to change and improve. That's a big one, because no one is perfect. No one has all the answers. But are you willing to listen and are you willing to understand the customer side of things? I feel that they are.

We've been using Zudy Vinyl for about eight months.

My impression of the stability of Zudy VINYL has been fantastic. I used to have hundreds of bug reports a week. I would find all these little micro things, and I would say, "Oh, goodness sakes, when I'm on this device and I do this, that crashes or that does." I'd get things back from my customers, but that has gone so far down. You don't notice pain when it's gone. You only notice pain when it's there. Until you asked me the question about stability, I'd forgotten how much pain I had, previously, trying to get all these systems and implementations deployed and how many problems it caused. This has been very stable and I've been very happy with it.

In terms of the scalability of my Quote Kong platform on the Zudy platform, I don't see the limits. And trust me, I've looked. I have pushed and prodded and I've pulled, and I've tried all kinds of other solutions, and inevitably, I start finding some problem where when iterations get up into the high numbers, this is going to fail. I haven't been able to find that with Zudy, and I've been very happy with that. It will be able to handle the massive scales that I want to be able to add on eventually. I haven't done it, so I can't prove that, other than my anecdotal. But trust me, I am someone who digs and digs and digs, and I push and I prod and I pull and I do all kinds of things to break stuff, and I'm good at breaking things. And I have not been able to find a flaw yet that is catastrophic, or something that I'm really worried about in terms of long-term scaling.

We're using Zudy VINYL almost exclusively for all of these functionalities that we're building out. I'm very excited about all of the future things that I want to do. It's great because every time I come up with some wacky list of things that I want to accomplish, we're always able to find solutions that will make it work. And they're not workarounds, which is fantastic. So many times with some of the other builds, it's all workarounds and that always scares me to death. The capabilities that we've had, the things that we've added—everything's being built in Zudy, with the exception of a couple of those outsourced things that I want. I don't need Zudy to handle a payment system. We've got good payment systems elsewhere. I don't need it to build Google Maps, but we hook into it and it works, so that's what matters. I've been very happy with it. We're very driven and dedicated to what we've built here and my customers are very excited about what we're presenting.

My experience with Zudy's technical support has been good. They definitely take in the things that I'm saying. When there is a problem, they do try and find the problem and try and fix it. 

With the launch of 3.0, there were some hiccups, there were some things that kind of got pushed off to the edge. There were some things that got pushed off to the edge that I had to remind them about and they were like, "Oh, right, sorry." They brought them back up to the forefront and they got them fixed.

Nothing's going to be perfect, but I've been very happy with the way they've been responding and the way that they take in my information.

Prior to Zudy, I actually built out the entire prototype in Microsoft Excel. And even Microsoft said, "Boy, that's a lot of stuff. We've seen Excel do some crazy things; yours is way up there for complexity. There's hardly any that are more complex than what you've just shown us." And that's Microsoft talking. So I thought I had a great template that I'd be able to have people build off of, because everything was working in there. And it wasn't the case, even though it was there and I had all the instructions. 

We tried things like FileMaker Pro. We tried things like Airtable and Webflow and UXPin, and coding from scratch. We also tried Bubble and MacGyver. There have been a lot of things that we've tried, or at least that I've tested out; even just straight, from-scratch HTML and starting everything from there. We just couldn't make it go. We were excited to finally be able to get everything working.

The way I came across Zudy for the first time was just a lot of internet searches. I'm someone who does a ton of research before I jump into anything. The one downfall is that they maybe weren't as public-facing, and they've admitted that. So I was hesitant to go with them at first, just because they didn't have a lot of information that I could really dig up. I think that's actually part of the reason why they're doing these videos, to be able to get the word out and get into the smaller and medium-sized businesses like mine. But it was a lot of research and it was a lot of checking and it was a lot of comparing. It wasn't until I talked to them and saw some of their demos that I really started to believe that maybe these guys could actually do it.

I was starting off with an enormously complex ask. There were a lot of things that I was trying to accomplish, and with a deceptively simple front-end interface. They really understood what it was I needed. Even they underestimated its complexity a little bit, but they weren't so far off. Other people were way off. It was a complex thing that we were able to set up and I'm very happy that we were able to set that up. It had some complexity to it, but it was, overall, relatively simple, especially for the level of complexity that I was trying to build.

In terms of the staff that was required for the deployment and the integration, we did hire their development team to do that. I was working with two guys, mostly. They were able to pull off stuff in much faster times than what I was able to do with my previous team, and with the team before that, and with the team before that. We've been able to accomplish a lot and I'm happy with that.

I'm able to get in there and dig around and understand. I'm able to look at little micro things and say, "Oh, wait a second, that one particular column on that one particular table is not in the right spot. We have to move it because of some problem I'm going to have a year and a half down the road." The transparency has been great, and I've been able to do it on a minimal amount of staff.

The number of people that are using Zudy VINYL, in a hands-on sense, from the back-end perspective, I've got four guys who are working on different things. From a customer perspective, we're still early days with the launches, but I'm at about 20 users that have been on it. They've been super-happy with it. The fun part is that I built something that used to need 20 years of construction experience to be able to do and my best beta-tester is my mother. I love her, but she is terrible when it comes to computers, and she has been able to use it as a customer, and that's always been my goal. If mom can use it, anybody can use it. It's been exciting to be able to get it to that ease of use and simplicity.

I'm starting to work with third-parties now. I'll have things that I will want to do for sure that are going to be outside. But for now, I've been able to do everything in-house, so I haven't had a lot of experience with trying to integrate other things. We are working on one right now.

Some of the outside sources that I'm trying to integrate it with, are things like Stripe for my payments. They do that pretty well. I'm trying to do something called LogRocket. That one is a little bit of an unknown. We've been able to integrate already with Google Maps and really unbelievably easily. In fact, I was demo-ing it for a client, and they [Zudy] had added it from the time that we talked about it the day before to when I was doing my presentation, and all of a sudden it was there, because I was showing them in my dev environment. So it was cool. 

I've got lots of other plans. There are other measuring systems I want to integrate. But from what I understand of the API tools that we have, it should be relatively straightforward. Nothing's easy, but I think we'll be able to do that.

So far, all of my costs have been going into building things. I haven't been able to go live with a lot of the things. We're live now, but just in beta form. The return on investment is going to be hard to express other than the fact that there were three and a half years of not fully wasted development, but almost—I almost chucked out everything we did. After all of the false starts and all of the promises from other people, how do you put a value on that?

I don't have the raw numbers right now because we haven't really started into sales, but all I can say is that it has taken us far less time to build this out than what it has with anything else. And the bigger part is that we actually crossed the finish line. How do you put a value on that?

The pricing and the licensing of Zudy are reasonable. Pricing is always a tricky thing. It could be a little simpler, but they're doing well. I'm happy with it. 

There were a couple of miscommunications early on, minor things, but they keep working with me and they keep trying to fix it, so that's all I can ask for. I think I'll be able to scale up with this without any problems. When I did the math, everything looked good. I've been happy with it so far.

Aside from their standard licensing fee, there are just little things. I'm using AWS, and they have a small rider on top of  whatever AWS is charging them, but that's fine. It saves me having to deal with it. I'm happy. I haven't really noticed any real "gotchas." There are little things, like if I want more speed I can pay for more, but I haven't needed that yet.

The advice I'd give people who are looking to implement Zudy is, first of all, know what it is you're having to build. What is it you're really trying to accomplish? But outside of some very small applications or gaming things, if you're looking to build some sort of business-process-driven website, something that you need both to look pretty good on the front-end and where you need a lot of calculations and tables and you need to jump through some hoops, I can't imagine building it from scratch.

I'd be happy to go with Zudy, again, by far. There really hasn't been anybody else I've been able to find that has been able to compare with what Zudy has been able to do for me. It's not to say they're not out there, but I wasn't able to find them, and I do a lot of research. Know what it is you're trying to accomplish, try to spell out as much as you possibly can, because the more you spell out, the easier it becomes to implement.

Zudy's improvement of their own features has been good. I've been on the platform for eight months and I've read a lot of things on what was version 1, and 2, and 3. But I can certainly submit things that I need to be improved or I need fixed. It does happen. They do listen to it. Obviously, you don't get everything you want, because it's not fully customized. But they're always doing improvements. They're always asking for feedback. I really like that. They seem to take my feedback seriously and implement what they can. They've got good help documentation, and they're asking for feedback on that. I've been happy with their level of iterations and improvements.

In terms of the updated UI and UX for version 3.0, I was on 2.3 when I first started and there was a pretty big leap between what they were doing on the UX side with that version versus 3.0. That always takes the user, myself, a little bit of time to learn some of the new tricks, but it's been nicer. The previous one was more technical and it wasn't as intuitive, whereas the 3.0 I'm finding a little more intuitive and it seems to be a little bit easier to use.

As for learning the new 3.0, compared to learning the 2.3, it would be easier if you're stepping into it and the first thing you're seeing is 3.0. If you're migrating, of course you're used to a button being in a weird spot, and that's where you're going to go look for it. So when there's a change, it's always a little harder. Whereas, if you're coming in fresh, congratulations, you don't have to go through quite so much of the learning pains that some of us who have been around with the older versions have. But overall, it's been good. I've been happy with it.

As for being more creative with VINYL 3.0, that hasn't been my focus right now. My focus is the Quote Kong logic. When I go back to my written documentation that I have it is thousands and thousands, probably close to 10,000, pages long now. The majority of what I've been doing is much more data modeling and logic rather than creativity. But, again, because I have access to being able to edit certain things, it's been wonderful that I can go in and edit it. I don't have to wait for somebody else to move it around and see what that looks like and then decide that I don't like it or make another change. So I've been able to do a lot of those little micro iterations myself, which has been very nice.

My rating for Zudy VINYL overall would be an eight or a nine, pretty high. Nothing's perfect, but I've been happy with them. I'm happy that I'm able to work with them and they work with me and we always try and find a solution or we table it to later, which I'm fine to do sometimes.

The biggest lesson I've learned from using Zudy VINYL is that there are many things that you have to try and set up when you're coding from scratch that I don't know that I'll ever want to code from scratch again. Not that I'm a coder. I'm not a full-stack developer. I know enough to be dangerous, but even the guys that I had were good guys. They were guys with a lot of experience and they worked really hard and they tried really hard, but we just couldn't get it done. It was just too complex of a problem, on top of all of the other little things that you have to do when you're trying to code from scratch. I liken it to the difference between drawing with paper versus using AutoCAD, or the difference between shingling a roof with a hammer and nails versus with an air gun. Why would I ever shingle a roof without an air gun, unless it's something really small? I've been happy.