Need new software to manage building your space probe? Want to double what your team does with software automation? Need help launching a consumer startup — like one of the top online dating sites? We've done all that. And with us you'll also find friendly, world-class technologists who explain technical concepts in plain English — which, really, is kind of like getting to pet a unicorn.
A few folks we've helped:
Replace your increasingly broken system you’ve outgrown with one that automates work, makes money, and lets you grow.
Some clients double what their team can do.
Custom Business Software
Make your department work like it actually should. Automate reports, eliminate duplicate work, reduce errors, and give management real visibility of what’s going on – all while integrating with other groups and enterprise data systems.
Work with top technologists to design a product users love. Create a flexible foundation for future work. Get to market in 90 days.
Work with a team that’s launched before.
Automate your custom workflow on web. From registration or application systems, to custom ticket sales, to media catalogs, or web portals of all sorts — if your needs go beyond a cookie-cutter WordPress site, we’ve got you covered.
Have you outgrown Excel? Is your key business data stored in a tottering tower of post-its? Does your current database leap up and assault staff with its user interface? Get a new database to automate your work, connect to other systems, and help you grow.
Set up an online store, take web donations for your non-profit, develop a custom ticket sales system, add membership subscriptions and renewals for your service, automatically tie into Amazon fulfillment, never forgetting SEO.
We’ve been creating custom database solutions with FileMaker Pro for 25 years. Our Caltech computer science grad founder loves FileMaker and considers it one of our secret weapons. We also connect FileMaker to the web, take it mobile, and support it long term.
With enterprise level service contracts of multiple tiers, hosting, maintenance, and ongoing support plans in various flavors — your investment is protected. We’re here for the long haul. The longest we’ve served a single customer is 27 years (we’ve been in business for 29.)
Our chief systems architect is a national award winning Caltech computer science grad. Our development lead is a startup veteran who designed Walt Disney Feature Animation's digital animation pipeline. Our design lead has over a decade of experience working in digital media with top consumer brands.
Since 1989 Mighty Ant DataWorks has used elite teams to create exceptional software to get more done, make money instead of wasting it, and help businesses grow. We work with organizations both big and small, from startups, to large enterprises, to the university down the road.
What could your organization achieve if you were no longer held back by outdated processes and systems? What more could you achieve if you had the technology to get vastly more work done and could stop wasting time on processes you've outgrown? We partner with companies to create custom software systems to do new things, working with you to identify the key business challenges and opportunities, then developing custom software systems tailored to your business's specific needs to help you grow. You don't need to be a technology-wiz to use a great custom system, any more than you need to be one to use an iPhone. You just need to know your business, and recognize the opportunity to do something new, or to do something old in a new and better way. Our customers love their custom software systems (sometimes they even give them pet names!) What more could you achieve if you had an exceptional, automated software system to get the current work done better as well as to do new things?
Mighty Ant is brilliant! They went to great lengths to understand our business, and are relentless in overcoming hurdles or glitches. They don’t have tunnel vision about a job, but look at our whole company and how changes impact our whole organization. Glenn Smith and his team have been very crucial in our automation, improving our productivity and managing our growth. We can achieve a 100% increase in our productivity because of them.
It’s fun to work with Mighty Ant. We could not have done it without them!
Would you hire a team of expert roofers then give each of them just half a hammer and some old, rusty, slightly bent nails to work with? That sounds hilariously foolish to do, but we often encounter businesses doing the equivalent — not because they planned to, but because processes and procedures have grown organically as the business has grown, until what worked great before (just one sales guy who occasionally jots things down on a Post-it) are now breaking down (we have multiple sales team members' desks completely buried in Post-its!) Tools you've outgrow hold you back and waste your staff's time. Automated systems get existing work done faster, and employ technology (and newly freed up staff time) to do new things to make your business grow.
For most business software and workflow automation the economics of custom software are simple. If you hire excellent staff, pay them well, and they do a great job for a year, you get a year of great output, and then the next year you have to pay again to get the same. With custom software systems you hire outstanding developers for a few months (generally at a higher rate than you pay your staff), and then when the project is done, the work isn’t just done for one year, it’s done permanently.
Automated work might be things you used to pay staff to do, such as weeks to prepare reports that turn into simply pressing a button, or automatically attaching incoming emails and attachments to associated digital case files. Or it might be new things you couldn’t do without the system like using machine vision to find part defects, or automatically ingesting thousands of legal bills to match them to license agreements to have software find millions in reimbursements owed but not yet recovered.
Pay for top employees, and you get output as long as you continue to pay them. Pay for the best software automation, then you pay once and get the best performance indefinitely. We’ve helped clients invest $200,000 to save $2,000,000 in costs. And then after the first two million dollars in savings, they save the money again — without having to pay again.
CaliBurger is a global, Southern California style burger and fries restaurant in 13 countries (and counting.) It describes itself as a tech company that sells great cheeseburgers. The company not only employs technology throughout operations (big in-store multimedia displays, interactive gaming, and now robotic food preparation in development) but also spins out technologies to new venture backed entities.
- Thomas Edison
For most organizations the answer is the same: when it’s the least expensive option. So if you have a non-custom option that gets your work done just as well, buy it — it’ll be a lot cheaper. Need to securely share documents of all types between team members? Don’t have us build a web portal, just sign up for Dropbox or Box. Need a way to easily sign electronic documents? Sign up for Docusign.
Want an automated system to assemble thousands of custom contracts, send them to Docusign for signature, then automatically download the signed documents into your system with custom notifications and workflow rules to radically save time? Now you’re talking about something Mighty Ant might do. Custom software is expensive. It only makes sense when it’s better than the alternative, which is usually paying staff. That’s why one of the first questions we ask potential clients is "What non-custom alternatives have you looked at?" If they’ve missed options we know about we point them out. Customer success, repeat business, and referrals are how we build our business, so we always direct people toward the best option we know of, whether or not that’s us.
When we did proceed with Mighty Ant, we got a product delivered on time, on budget, and which had mobile capabilities that weren’t even in the project specification that let us use the system not just in the office but also out in the field.
Mighty Ant was able to understand the big picture of our business model and what we were attempting to do in our industry, giving us a solution that met our current needs, but also had the flexibility to grow and expand with us as we moved forward executing our business model. Mighty Ant excels at simplifying and combining complex data bases and making it usable for our employees with custom reporting.
We liked that Mighty Ant wasn’t locked into one or two technologies, but had a large toolbox to choose from to bring the project to fruition. Mighty Ant was platform and technology agnostic which allows our employees to use whatever computer or device they choose.
Depends on what it does, who built it, and how well. The better the system is built, the cheaper it is to maintain, and the less expensive it is to extend. But the base cost comes from a combination of the skill of those building it and what it does. We provide a ballpark cost range for projects during a customer’s first free consultation call. We also provide guidance on typical projects for different sorts of work (mobile app development, workgroup automation, ecommerce / SEO site setup, etc.) on this site where each type of work is discussed.
Once we know the cost, we compare it to the benefits received to calculate if the project is worth doing, how long its pay off period is, and how much it adds to the bottom line going forward. We look for return on investment of 10x or greater in most cases, and prefer a payoff period of under two years in general -- though always the shorter the better -- but industry-wide, return on investment, cost, and what a client get varies quite widely.
For example, building the Obamacare exchange and marketplace (a project Mighty Ant DataWorks had no part in) took about 3 years, was done by 40+ subcontractors, and was coordinated by the government’s own Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. This large and complex system built to sign up Americans for health care coverage cost over a billion dollars and on its nationwide launch day, was able to sign up... six people (with some errors in their applications.) So the cost was over a billion dollars, nearly 3 years of time, and the benefit was a non-working site that could barely sign up six people.
The government clearly overpaid.
The project was an incredible digital meltdown. Fortunately, President Obama knew some guys. He called up folks at Google and Facebook and others from Silicon Valley, got them to volunteer to work like crazy around the clock (in quite inferior working conditions — Google’s free cafeteria food beats what they make IT folks pay for in the capital) and in a couple of months these digital heroes saved the online exchanges and actually built something that worked. And then some of them went on to found organizations like the U.S. Digital Service (great group.) These developers clearly undercharged.
When the Healthcare.gov site crashed and burned at launch, and then in the months after as it was made right, more than one client told us it was a shame we hadn’t been involved in developing the system to avoid all the trouble. We told clients there were people like us involved in the effort — the government just wasted a billion dollars by calling them second.
Bill Gates
Founder of Microsoft and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
In 29 years Mighty Ant has never failed to deliver what we promised, yet, industry-wide, companies spend billions a year on projects that completely fail more than 50% of the time. That’s a staggering statistic. Half of cars don’t die before they are driven off the lot. Half of bridges don’t fall down while people are driving over them. So why do some teams nearly always succeed, while in general half of software projects fail? It’s a great question we answer elsewhere. But more important to focus on than why projects fail is the single most important factor in project success: developer quality. Developer quality is the biggest single factor influencing a project’s cost, quality, performance, and success.
Hire two bricklayers to build a brick wall, both with many years of experience, but one the best in the world, and one just average — and studies show you might see a factor of two difference in their productivity. Hire two software developers to do the same task, and decades of research shows you will often see a factor of ten or more difference in their work. Our firm has shown such a 10x advantage over competitors. Our tools, pre-built technology, and best in class developers let us do for 30k what others need $300,000 to do, and let us create for 200k for what from others would cost millions.
New automation and the machine learning revolution are coming to a workplace near you .
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It’s time to change the definition of Artificial General Intelligence, but only because the old definition is both useless and confusing.
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Developer quality is the biggest determinant of software project success, greatly exceeding the contribution of all other factors. Developers differ in capabilities by more than a factor of ten. At Mighty Ant DataWorks, we’ve observed such a 10x advantage.
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Mighty Ant founder Glenn Smith answers an actual email from a friend about developing software who doesn’t have the money to hire Mighty Ant!
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Various local news outfits, as well as the Purdue Technology Center itself have taken note of Mighty Ant’s new office in the Purdue Research Park. One advantage our new Mighty Ant East office has over our Caltech adjacent office in Pasadena: Geese!
See the Geese!Mighty Ant DataWorks has decades of experience in walking clients through the software development process. We work with small businesses, the enterprise, for profit business, and non-profits alike. From initial assessment, to system specification, software construction, system testing, user training, system deployment, maintenance, long term support, and system additions, we have you covered — and can provide references of others we’ve worked with for more than 20 years.
Do you see an opportunity to let technology help you work in a smarter way in your work place? Do you wonder what is feasible and what it might cost? We love to provide answers, and an initial assessment is free. Drop us an email, or call us today at (800) 216-8182.
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