Circuitlink International

About Circuitlink

Headquartered in Sydney NSW Australia, Circuitlink specializes in the design, manufacture and sales of electronic products for the automotive industry and various other transport governing bodies throughout Australia. Their products expand these markets with equipment for vehicle monitoring, vehicle diagnostics, digital CCTV and fare collection. Circuitlink has established a well deserved reputation throughout the world for the commitment to manufacturing excellence.

Situation

Accompanying their manufactured electronic products, Circuitlink has developed and continues to maintain over 25 software applications, written in .Net, Visual Basic 6, and C++. Their solutions also include PDF manuals and Crystal Reports files, all of which need to be updated as improvements are made.

The development team has been using a subscription based update deployment service for the past 4 years. However, as their business has grown and the number of deployed solutions has increased, the additional royalties charged for distributing their updates prompted an investigation for an alternative updating solution.

Enter Kinetic Jump Software

The ensuing investigation uncovered AppLife Update from Kinetic Jump Software. To compare its capabilities with that of their established solution, it was decided to give AppLife Update a try on a small independent project. Summing up the pilot project, “From the moment we started to use AppLife Update, we knew we found a solution that had the simplicity, functionality and flexibility we needed to meet the deployment and maintenance needs of our growing customer base,” stated Peter McConaghy, R&D Manager at Circuitlink International. “The solution met our expectations of lowering the annual cost of running the service and made it easier to distribute the task of generating software updates amongst the team.”

This set in motion the activity to roll out AppLife Update into the rest of their applications and phase out the use of their previous subscription based service. To accomplish this, Circuitlink developers created an Update Manager application, built on AppLife Update, which checks for, downloads and applies updates upon request for about 20 independent applications. As these applications are improved, Circuitlink developers use InstallShield® to create Windows Installer patch files, and AppLife Update to publish the updates.

Results

The initial focus was cost control, which lead to the discovery of AppLife Update. In AppLife Update, Circuitlink found a solution that has all the deployment features needed to very easily create their own Update Manager and take back control of their application maintenance deployment requirements.

The return on investment was realized in a flash. AppLife Update was cost effective, lowered the total cost of ownership, and with its update actions provided greater flexibility and control in deploying and maintaining applications. With AppLife Update, Circuitlink is no longer penalized for their success. They can deploy updates to today’s customers as well as tomorrow’s, without increased subscription costs or royalties.

About Kinetic Jump Software, LLC

Kinetic Jump Software provides comprehensive and innovative solutions that help software teams advance iterative development practices through improved software maintenace management. AppLife® solutions are deployed worldwide in over 30 countries, by corporations, government, and private industry.