The market for Web-based and mobile applications keeps growing, and a new Providence-based consultancy, Panoptic Development, is seizing the opportunity, creating custom software for information extraction, content management, social networking, quality assurance and more.
University of Rhode Island graduate Michael Leone, one of the three principals, focused on engineering, recently spoke with Providence Business News about the firm’s work, which involves primarily nonprofit organizations.
PBN: You were a spinoff of Public Display. What was that company’s focus?
LEONE: We focused on two things: We were developing an application called FuseCal, which was a Web-based consumer application in which you could enter a Web page with events, like the Lupo’s calendar, and it would automatically pull out the events and put them into your personal calendar, and we were doing a lot of consulting as well to fund that. The first month of 2010 we spun off Panoptic Development, with the same clients, focusing solely on software engineering consulting.
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PBN: Who are your clients? Are you serving a local audience?
LEONE: We’re pretty much serving a national market. Lifespan is our only Rhode Island client. We have a client, for example, that does construction specifications; they’re based in Alexandria, Va. They publish industry standards for construction projects … and we’ve built an application for them to make all that information available to their clients. It also provides green building specifications for construction projects, like if you want LEED certification.
[The tools are] used on the fly, and there’s actually a [mobile] application as well – though we didn’t develop it – to make the information available on any mobile phone. If you’re an architect, you’re on the construction site, and you’re trying to figure out which carpet to order, you can pull up the MatchFormat website, look up the specifications, look at the standardized work orders for carpets. … right on the spot.
PBN: Tell us about the video surveillance system you put together.
PBN: With your Lifespan project, you computerized the patient-assessment forms for Bradley Hospital. How much potential do you see to build on this concept for different applications – within Lifespan and also with other clients?
LEONE: The application we built for Lifespan is theirs; they own it. But within Lifespan, they definitely want to apply that to many different concepts. This first release we did earlier this year was for the children’s depression assessment, but they have a list of like 70 assessments that they want to extend this to.
And while we wouldn’t be able to use that software directly for other clients, we could definitely leverage that experience, so we’re actively looking at other medical organizations, because it’s huge right now. … There’s a big push in the health care industry to digitize all the medical records, and there are a lot of tax incentives right now.
PBN: How much of a challenge is it to develop applications that tie into electronic medical records? PBN: What other projects are you working on? PBN: You’ve got a team of three partners. Is the rest of your work done by freelancers? PBN: How good a location is Providence for you, given that you have only one local client?
LEONE: It’s quite a challenge. It’s a technical challenge as is any Web application that manages a lot of data … and working with health care, there’s also [federal Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act] regulations, and you have to be very sensitive to patient privacy. And anytime you make a change to an application, it’s not like with a consumer website where you can just go live; you have to consider every possible way in which it could affect patient privacy. It’s a rather lengthy and bureaucratic process you have to go through, and for good reason.
LEONE: One project that’s just been released is GettingCovered.org, a website we’re building. It’s a nonprofit organization that’s promoting the new health care regulations – for example, young Americans can be covered under their parents’ plan until they’re 26 now. … There’s been a big PR push from many nonprofits and medical organizations that want this to be widely known. We built the website and are managing all the underlying information.
LEONE: We have a small network of about four different contractors that we use for software development and graphic design. We chose to go that way because it gives us a more agile team. I think a lot of consulting companies try to structure themselves like a startup, and try to get employees to work for them. We operate more like a law firm or an accounting firm, where we have a team of partners, and then we bring in other people to work for us, and eventually we would like to bring some of them in and make them partners as well.
LEONE: It’s definitely an interesting question, and a lot of people have been dealing with that. … As things stand now, it’s simply not as appealing of a choice as, say, starting a company in Massachusetts. There is less of a tech industry here, there are fewer resources, there are fewer clients looking to engage software companies’ services. But the [company] founders are all from Rhode Island, and it’s almost a rewarding challenge to try to start a company from Rhode Island. Plus many software companies now have distributed teams, like we have folks working in San Francisco as well. And although it would be great to look purely for local clients right now, it’s simply not feasible for us – we have to look nationally. •
