Add AI capability to the product
An assistant that answers questions over the customer's own data. Agents that handle the exceptions your users handle by hand today. Built on your schema, deployed to every tenant.
For software vendors
Your product, extended at the speed your customers now expect.
Your customers are asking for AI in the product they already pay you for. Outline and the factory let you add it, or rebuild the parts that are holding you back, in weeks rather than roadmap years, built once over your schema and reused across every customer.
Uses
Three things vendors use it for.
Rebuild what is holding you back
The screens, modules or reporting that are slowing sales or losing renewals. Described to Outline, rebuilt by the factory, dropped into the product you already have.
Ship what customers keep asking for
The backlog items you have never had the capacity to reach. Each one a conversation and a fixed price, not a quarter of a developer's year.
You know your product and your customers. Outline gives you a way to turn that knowledge directly into shipped software, which you own, without hiring a second development team.
One build, every tenant
Built once over your schema. Deployed to every customer.
The platform is connected to your product's database once, with your schema and your business meaning in the semantic layer. Every application the factory builds then works for every customer running your product, in their own tenant, with their own data and access rules. Your customers can run it in your cloud, in ours, or on their own servers, including the ones that have never moved off a server in the back office.
Your schema, understood once
We model your product's data and meaning in the platform. Every build after that starts from it.
One build, many tenants
An application is built against your product, not against one customer. Rolling it to the next customer is configuration, not a project.
Fleet upgrades
Patches, platform releases and model upgrades go to every tenant together, tested against each application first. Your customers stay in step without you chasing them.
Legacy stacks welcome
We have spent twenty years connecting to the databases and application servers that most modern tooling ignores, including Progress OpenEdge, where we have deep roots. If your product runs on one of them, that is a reason to talk to us, not a reason not to.
The channel rule
We never sell into your customer base.
That is the rule, and it is in the contract. You commission the applications, you set the price to your customers, and you bill them. Your customers deal with you. We are the factory behind your product, not a vendor beside it.
Ownership
You own the code.
Everything the factory builds for your product is yours: the specification, the source code, the tests. It is delivered into your repositories under your licence, and you can take it, change it or have someone else maintain it without asking us. The platform pieces it runs on, the data platform and the knowledge platform, are open source, so there is no proprietary layer between your product and your customers. Where a part we build for you would be useful to others, we may ask to promote it to the shared kit. That is your decision; if you agree, we don't charge you for building it. The only thing you cannot take with you is the factory itself, and you will not need to.
| What | Who owns it |
|---|---|
| The specification Outline produces | You |
| The application code, screens, agents and tests | You, in your repositories |
| Reusable parts promoted to the shared kit | Open, shared across the kit. Promotion is your call, and if you agree to it we don't charge for building that part |
| The data and knowledge platforms | Open source |
| Outline and the factory | inmydata |
Commercial model
How it works commercially.
No day rates for building. Each application has a fixed price, agreed when you approve its spec, and a monthly fee per customer tenant for keeping it current. Hosting is optional and flat per environment. You set your own price to your customers on top.
| Who does what | You | Us |
|---|---|---|
| Decide what gets built | Yes, through Outline | Advise |
| Build, test and release | Yes | |
| Price and bill your customers | Yes | |
| First-line support to your customers | Yes | |
| Second-line support, platform, patches, upgrades | Yes | |
| Own the customer relationship | Yes | Never |
The first conversation is free. Connecting the platform to your product is a short, estimated and capped piece of work; after that, everything is per application.
Tell us what your customers keep asking for.
Half an hour on your product, your schema and the one feature that would move renewals. We'll tell you what the first application would cost and when it would ship.