PuntoExe Consultores is a young company and as such, it belongs to a new generation of software companies, focused on the development of its applications and tools and aiming at incorporating new technologies.
PuntoExe was born in 2000 with the task of developing a generating system for e-commerce oriented web portals. The result was the birth of EPIWAY. This was the first contact with GeneXus, because part of its development was made with version 8.0 of the tool. Later, and due to growing demand from international clients, they decided to migrate the EPIWAY Backoffice from win to web.
The experience acquired in the Backoffice migration was useful for PuntoExe to integrate into its business line Outsourcing Services for migrating systems from Win to Web, for software companies and others who may have designed their own GeneXus applications. It was in that context that INSIS presented the proposal for the migration of its Integrated Accounting Management system (GCI in Spanish). This migration offered a serious time challenge. A system with over 2,000 GeneXus objects had to be migrated in a short period of time while it required analyzing and classifying over 600 WorkPanels. It was also necessary to develop a new product as they did it: PuntoExe Tools, a tool suite based on GeneXus Patterns, for the automatic generation of the web interface of a GeneXus system.
Mario Bustamante, head of the Commercial Department of PuntoExe explained it clearly: “from the start we understood that our product and later our services had to be oriented to integration with products from other companies”. It was precisely the contact with GeneXus Patterns that served as a pillar for project completion. Bustamante assured that “we have been able to measure the benefit of using this resource (in terms of GeneXus Code lines generated by the Development Team) and we have concluded that it improves the performance of each programmer by 300%, in addition to the advantage of incorporating normalized code which can be regenerated automatically when there are improvements”.
The company, whose main clients are Uruservice and Chic Parisien, has understood that the contribution of the GeneXus Community is basic for growth, especially the GeneXus Meetings. “It would not have been possible to develop on the basis of Patterns without the support we received from Artech” commented Bustamante, especially if you take into account what is the model that PuntoExe is following. According to its own vision, the company aims “to be a Software Factory model, with innovative forms of integration and contributing to best practices in project management”.
Offering outsourcing services has led to a restructure in the company's organization. PuntoExe is now divided into four areas: Administration, Sales, Graphic Design and Project Development. This latter one has a variable number of free-lance programmers, depending on the stage of evolution of the development projects.
That’s why in some cases, to develop work for its clients, PuntoExe has formed its own development teams, while in other opportunities they have included some of the client’s own programmers. This dynamic way of working optimizes a project’s costs but it can only be efficient if there are tools for standardizing and accelerating development work, such as is the case of the PXTools. This stems from the concept that opportunities require adaptation, and makes its dynamic attitude a key value for the company.
Heraclitus, one of the great Greek philosophers, argued that “Change alone is unchanging” and PuntoExe has understood it to perfection.