About Sam

Successfully developing software product requires a careful balance of competing forces. New businesses need cash flow, and v1.0 can't be completed too quickly. At the same time, if the company vision is dependant on technology and no thought is given to architecture, you have painted yourself in a corner you can't get out of (the same applies to large internal systems which support operations at established organizations - after a time IT staff can end up just treading water trying to keep up with bug fixes and not making progress towards supporting key corporate objectives).

In the above diagram we say that where you are today is your Architecture of Reference, and where you want to be is your Architectural Vision. We plot Deviation from Strategy against a series of timed and calculated version releases, often spanning years. There are formal definitions of Architectural Vision which include the set of "principles" you want your ideal system to adhere to. What this diagram shows is that a reasonable path forward is to accept that we will never reach our architectural vision, instead we make progressively better approximations - violating our principles in the short term to deal with resource constraints, as long as there's an intention and a possibility to un-violate those principles at some future revision (credit to Stan Letarte, currently Enterprise Architect at Xerox Corporation - Stan worked with Sam and mentored him in Architecture in the late 90s and early Nils). This dynamic is easy enough to show in a diagram, but there are relatively few individuals who posess the technical expertise and the business acumen to execute against this plan over the long term.

When Sam Weiner founded ObjectFrame in 1997, he had already worked for 6 years as a QA Engineer, a Network Administrator, a Software Developer, and a Team Lead. ObjectFrame consulted to Xerox, consulted to Monroe County, built control software for optics manufacturing machines on an outsourced basis, and solved other technical problems through 2002. To see Sam's resume, click here.

Most of ObjectFrame's experience was in enterprise web application development - building distributed web application server based systems to do things like global account management, distributed group collaboration, and decision support for Department of Social Services caseworkers. By the end of 2002, Sam had been an Architect on several key applications, and had learned a great deal about running a small business. But the dot-com bubble burst finally caught up with ObjectFrame and Sam and his partners decided to part ways and take real jobs.

Sam held onto ObjectFrame, but put the company on ice and played a Team Lead/Architect role for eBidEnergy, a start-up doing energy information analysis. Here Sam learned something about dealing with venture capitalists, finding channel partners for distribution, and so on before eBid hit on hard times in late 2004 for a number of non-technical reasons. Coincidentally, one of Sam's old partners became VP of Engineering for ePlus, a $700M company building B2B eCommerce solutions (among other things) and Sam left eBid to join ePlus. Of course energy consumption then became a hot topic in the public eye, and PowerTrak, the product Sam helped architect for eBid, went on to enable eBid to be acquired by a company called EnerNOC. With PowerTrak added to their existing command and control features, EnerNOC had a complete solution to managing corporate energy spend, enabling them to successfully complete an IPO and become a public company (Sam is still close friends with the Director of Product Development and Engineering as well as several other key EnerNOC personnel).

At ePlus, Sam became Development Manager for a suite of web based B2B eCommerce products which help suppliers share electronic product data with buyers as the cornerstone of eProcurement strategies (without clean, classified and attributed product data, eProcurement fails - a fact that is often overlooked). This is a fundamentally unsolvable problem using current technology. Particularly in the MRO space, suppliers range in size from mom and pop shops to Home Depot Supply, and each have their own homegrown systems which represent product data in their own vernacular. Buyers, furthermore, have a view of product data which is different from all suppliers, and legitimately so, driven by their business domain. It's a "Tower of Babel" problem which would require flawless natural language processing technology to even begin to have complete automation. The ePlus solution is a clever combination of a sophisticated pattern matching engine (including some millions of proven patterns), a web based supplier portal for data exchange, and human assistance in the form of Supplier Enablers and a Content Factory in Houston. At ePlus, Sam has rounded out his understanding of management, particularly of distributed teams - Sam's team has consisted of engineers in Houston, Connecticuit, Rochester, and (increasingly) India.

In mid-2007 Sam decided he had been around the block enough to give entrepreneurship another try, and he dusted off ObjectFrame.

The first task in re-defining ObjectFrame was to select a technology stack which would maximize efficiency while at the same time leveraging the progress made over the last decade and a half in development process methodologies and application design patterns. The goal was to be able to build web applications quickly, but with a reasonable level of architectural integrity. Sam's single most distinctive characteristic is his ability to keep an eye on architecture while still making progress towards objectives with all due haste. Sam chose the Symfony framework to be ObjectFrame's technology stack. For a detailed discussion, see the Symfony page, but suffice it to say that Symfony is the best technology stack Sam has worked with (and he has developed extensively in .NET, Java, C++, and many other languages, code libraries, and frameworks).

The next step was to establish a delivery team. Having worked with an Indian outsourcing firm called NetWeb for the previous 4 years at ePlus, Sam was comfortable with their capabilities and work ethic, and had no concens bringing them in on a contract with Optimax, a manufacturer of custom precision optics. Sam worked with Optimax to understand their business requirements relative to an expert system to mathmatically help design optical manufacturing processes, established a development methodolgy and supporting tooling (all open source), and trained NetWeb on Symfony and the methodology. Within 8 months Sam and NetWeb delivered a solution which several other vendors had failed to deliver in different attempts - each of them multiple years long - over the last decade. Optimax was thrilled, and ObjectFrame continues to develop Lightspeed, adding modules to replace old "siloed" applications, as well as new modules which address the needs of other Optimax departments as Sam understands Optimax's end-to-end business process. For a full discussion, see the Lightspeed Case Study

With Sam's experience, coupled to NetWeb's delivery strength (NetWeb is over 100 employees strong), and with the Symfony framework in place, ObjectFrame is well positioned to handle the most difficult custom web development projects. Whether you are progressively automating business processes across your organization like Optimax or starting a new web based business like myYC and need to get version 1.0 out quickly while making sure you have good building blocks for your future, ObjectFrame can help you get the job done.