2015: Year in Review

In this interview, we take a look back and a look ahead with Infragistics' Founder & CEO Dean Guida. Read on!

With 2015 in the rearview mirror, what are some of the highlights that stand out?

Our core strategy of keeping UX First has helped us focus on ensuring our customers deliver the best digital experience on any device. With over 1.5 million developers & designers in our community, our users built some awesome apps on iOS, Android and Windows Desktops in 2015, which we’re thrilled to be a part of. We’ve also taken on a number of amazing new customers as well, like the House of Commons, NATO, the European Commission and Fujitsu, the #1 largest systems integrator in Japan. Fujitsu, for example, aims to use our tools to build more than 1,000 apps in the next few years for their customers! From a product perspective, 2015 has seen a lot of improvement across the board:

1. We shipped a native Android, Web, and beta Windows Desktop version of ReportPlus, our cloud-based BI dashboarding tool, and we improved upon the beautiful visualizations you’ll find in the iOS version too.
2. We expanded the file sync & share capabilities of SharePlus, our mobile SharePoint solution, to include all the major cloud file storage systems (Google, One Drive, DropBox) and on-premise file network shares.
3. We added collaboration and community capabilities to our UX prototyping tool, Indigo Studio, by creating Indigo Design. This online community allows designers (and enterprise users) to share UI patterns & designs, and comment on prototypes with a threaded discussion to improve user interactions and user experience.
4. Our award-winning UI components & frameworks received many improvements and additions, including a spreadsheet component in Windows Forms and WPF (and soon JavaScript), along with a rich Excel calculation engine.

And in addition to our product offerings, we also added many new passionate people to our teams around the world who love UI/UX!

Your 2015 developer tools releases were heavily focused on customer feedback. What can customers expect in 2016?

In the coming year, we’re going to continue to focus even more heavily on developer productivity, and by that, I mean creating tools to help build mobile native & hybrid front ends that are connected to cloud services. 2016 is all about growing with the landscape. With our UX prototyping tool, Indigo Studio, we’re adding support for data to round out the rapid design/validation/generation scenario. And with ReportPlus’ API, you’ll be able to add BI cloud-based dashboarding to your app within minutes, and ship native viewer & dashboard creator experiences on iOS, Android (viewer only), Windows Desktop and the Web too (viewer only).

With mobility driving the need for data visualization solutions, how can Infragistics help in that space?

With ReportPlus, you can create data visualizations from the most popular enterprise data sources. And we designed ReportPlus to not only be a mobile & cloud-first BI dashboarding tool, but as an embeddable solution for our ISV/Enterprise customers as well. You can rebrand and restyle all our software on mobile, Web, and desktop, and you can embed or bundle our apps with your offering. We also built a flexible architecture for the cloud backend to work with any public cloud (Azure, AWS, BlueMix), on-premise system, or in SharePoint (cloud or on-premise).

How will the Internet of Things impact what Infragistics has in store for the future?

The IoT is really exploding now, with devices and sensors everywhere and data streaming from these sensors to the cloud or to big data stores. There’s a growing need for solutions that first, make sense of this data, and second, empower users to make better decisions with that data. Infragistics helps software developers visualize of this data with our rich, interactive UI components, along with expressive data visualizations in ReportPlus, that can be tailored to provide industry or vertical-based solutions that can be consumed anywhere.

At Infragistics, it’s said that “Experience Matters”. What does that mean?

Simply put, we help developers and designers build the best digital experiences. This is our mission and our core strategy. Your brand is composed of customer experiences, employee experiences, and your customers’ interactions with your company’s products, services, and people. If these are all positive experiences, then you’ll not only achieve your business goals of customer loyalty, growth, and profit; you’ll also enhance the lives of all those that come in contact with you.

Where do you see IG in 5 years?

In 2021 (and beyond), I see Infragistics as an ever-expanding, fun place where great designers and developers want to work and where we are known for helping our customers build the best digital experiences out there!

For more insights into the future of Infragistics, be sure to follow Dean on Twitter and LinkedIn. Thanks for making 2015 a great year - we look forward to what the future has in store!