SBIR-STTR Award

This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will lead to a Do-It-Yourself hosted database-driven web application platform that will enable non-programmer business process owners to rapidly build simple custom structured data exchange and workflow applications for their business processes. If successful, the project will lead to the development of a web application specification method and a corresponding system that is: (i) high level, i.e. business process owners only choose options and specify aspects of the application they can easily understand from a business point of view and (ii) sufficiently expressive to allow the specification of the applications needed by the organizations. The project combines the following innovations to achieve (i) and (ii): First, a page-driven/workflow-driven specification method, where the owner specifies only easily understood aspects of the pages of workflow applications. Inference algorithms inspect the evolving application, propose to the user semantically meaningful options and automatically create database schema, queries and pages.

The applications thus enabled by the effort would afford developers the opportunity to quickly and inexpensively develop a host of applications for the small-to-medium sized businesses that otherwise would be unable to afford custom web-enabled applications. If successful, a significant market opportunity exists.

This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II proposal discusses the continued commercialization and research & development plans of App2You, Inc., developer of a Web-based platform that enables non-programmers to rapidly create and evolve fully custom hosted forms-driven workflow applications where users with different roles and rights interact. Such a platform will have a broad impact on organizations of all sizes by empowering nonprogrammer business process owners to quickly and easily deploy applications that capture the business processes of their organizations. Preliminary results from Phase I engagements shows that the platform has the maximum impact on enabling externally-facing Customer Relationship Management (CRM) for Small and Medium Businesses (SMBs), which use the applications to facilitate and streamline interactions with customers and partners, achieve lower process management and customer/partner servicing costs, increase customer/partner satisfaction and grow revenues. App2You has the potential to operate as an equalizer between large companies and SMBs with limited time and money available to for their IT infrastructure, since it enables the latter to obtain applications for their processes despite limited resources. Phase II will expand the impact by systematically reaching SMBs and promoting the use of the platform, making its use even simpler, and also finding additional verticals, such as forms distributorships and form abandonment cases, where forms-driven workflows can generate values. Finally the Phase II project will create enhancements that facilitate successful collaborations between business process owners and ad hoc information technology staff. If successful, the App2You platform has the potential to address an emerging and potentially significant opportunity in the SMB space.