By Allan Maurer
ATLANTA—Many people who worked for a company large or small in the last decade have experienced using software that performed poorly and did not solve the problem it was purchased to handle even after repeated attempts to fix it, often at considerable cost. One major reason for that, says Kevin Mobley, founder and CEO of the Ian Thomas Group, is that many developers simply do not understand the issues in writing high performance software code.

Mobley founded the Ian Thomas Group three years ago after years of working in the software industry for firms such as IXL and Fidelity Information Services. The bootstrapped company took its name in part from Mobley’s son, “Ian.” It is not looking for venture funding at this time.

Mobley tells TechJournal South, “There is not a lot of strong academic training around this work. The concepts around software performance methodology is not covered well anywhere.”

That means that many computer science students graduate without being equipped to write high performance code.

Another problem, he notes, is the use of existing software modules to create new applications. That allows rapid development in days or weeks rather than the months or years new programs once required. “Lots of people don’t understand the building blocks, what they do to the CPU, how long they take to render, so they write a lot of bad code.”

But, he points out, “You can’t go back. People aren’t going to be writing code the old way.” For a company with a new product that has performance issues, that can become a real challenge “With the clock ticking away in the background because it has to ship,” says Mobley.

All of this is of mission critical importance to companies that depend on their Internet and internal applications to run quickly and as near flawlessly as possible. Customers tolerate very little time-delay when buying on the Internet, for instance and studies show that if they’re frustrated by difficulty in finding information or paying for a product, they leave. Quickly.

“If a payment system is having performance issues, that company is going to experience some financial losses,” Mobley says. “We saw that occur with a number of companies. Incorrect billing, underperforming or slow performing systems due to bad architecture, systems going up and down like a yo-yo.”

Those problems can also lead to contract disputes if a company has service agreements, he notes. So financial costs to the company can be both direct and indirect.

Mobley says this is not at all an uncommon problem, even with top brands such as Apple Computer and AT&T, which experienced iPhone sign-on problems when the product was first released. “In the case of a strong brand like Apple, they were able to overcome those problems,” says Mobley. “But few companies have the brand Apple has. Problems like this can become severe in terms of lost customers.”

Sometimes, Mobley says, a vendor will take a potential buyer to a large customer where the software is running smoothly. The reason it is running smoothly, he says, is often that many specific changes were made by the company so it would and it is essentially customized for them. It may not run that well at all for another customer without changes.

“I can’t tell you how many times a client looked at us and said, ‘I thought it worked for the other guy.’ “Consulting with clients on picking software vendors is part of the Ian Thomas Group business Mobley says he most wants to grow.

Mobley’s 18 person staff includes “Folks who were doing development when hardware resources were a lot more limited. They learned to write much better code. Experience comes into play in understanding what works and what doesn’t. If we get engaged during the design stage as 10 to 20 percent of the project, we make sure the architecture is going to work. That’s ideal. “

Unfortunately, the company more often goes to work in an “emergency room syndrome,” says Mobley. “They come in screaming, the house is burning down. So you get engaged to come in and put the fire out. Then they ask you how they can avoid this going forward.”

Mobley says the Ian Thomas Group focuses on what is causing its clients the greatest pain. “You have to marry this up to money and identify the business problem,” he says. “But even using that as a filter, we often find problems and really poor code in every tier.”

The company is also building a series of products to help developers design and deliver high performance applications. The first, a monitoring system, is in beta testing now and should be released later this year. A series of others are in the company’s pipeline, Mobley says.

Online: www.ianthomasgroup.com

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