Like every app covered in
Developer Insight so far, FileMaker Pro is deeply popular and a very longstanding success -- but in every other way, it is completely different. Most apps are bought by people who need them to do a certain job, but if you buy FileMaker Pro, you're actually buying it in order to then create your own solution to a job or a problem. It is a development tool just as much as it is a consumer one, and that has advantages and disadvantages -- but it also attracts a gigantic degree of loyalty from its users.
Some 20 million copies of FileMaker Pro have been sold, and currently the company averages around a million further sales each year. All of those sales are to people who are using this software in their business, but some of them are to people whose business is in using this software. FileMaker Pro has an entire industry, an ecosystem of developers who in some cases spend their complete careers using this application. It's not that they work for the FileMaker Corporation, it's that the database application is big enough and successful enough to enable independent developers to thrive off it.
The FileMaker world
One person who does work for the FileMaker Corporation is Andrew LeCates, director of Solutions and Consulting, and we had to ask him first how weird it is making a product that people's livelihoods rely on.
"It is weird and marvellous at the same time," says LeCates. "I think having been around the product, the company, and the industry for so long, I have many acquaintances that are professional developers who focus primarily on the FileMaker platform that have been doing so for more than 20 years -- and when one attends a FileMaker conference, we're growing. We have lots of new customers that attend, the energy is fantastic, but it is amazing to me to always see faces that you've known for that long and we've all grown our businesses together. So there's a tremendous responsibility, but it really is a wonderful thing -- some of them with multiple offices and very global reach in their own right, so one can conduct a very strong business with FileMaker being a core part of the service delivery.
"I think part of the core sort of reason-to-be for FileMaker is to allow mere mortals, right, the 'subject matter expert,' to self-solve problems and get things done. One of the consequences is that our development community has lots of extremely smart, extremely creative, and somewhat impatient people who figure out ways to get things done -- and when you start meeting like-thinking developers who are solving problems, there is an instant sense of community.
"I've been to many conferences for many different platforms and technologies, and the FileMaker annual conference -- and some of the other conferences around the world that focus on FileMaker -- they're quite unique. A close-knit community there that has similar [needs and] that really understand each other. It's really a great thing, it's one of the reasons I've been here quite so long."
Origins
Last year was the 30th anniversary of FileMaker, and while the company is owned by Apple, the origins of the product were far away from Cupertino. "The genesis was a few developers at -- I believe it was -- the Wang Corporation, who were using non-GUI computer environments," says LeCates. "The Macintosh had just come out, and they saw an opportunity to do something with data in a graphical user interface environment. So FileMaker came to be there in the late 80s, and when the Claris Corporation was formed, also around then, one of their early acquisitions was the FileMaker platform. At the time, it was already dubbed FileMaker Plus, because it was getting into its senior age but throughout the 90s, the Claris Corporation evolved the FileMaker platform and the feature set of the core product. It expanded, and eventually we got FileMaker Server, and the product was developed to be multi-platform, Mac and Windows, to suit the sort of business intent of the FM platform."
It's hard to paint a picture of a FileMaker developer, as they are so varied, but it's easier when one is front of you: Andrew LeCates was introduced to the database early in his career, and really stayed with it in various ways ever since. "I first heard of FileMaker before it was owned by Claris, actually. It was called, at the time, FileMaker 4 then -- and in the 1980s, I was essentially applying for a summer job to pay my way through university. I built FileMaker systems for my university, for one of the colleges there, and that was my first introduction to databases.
"I thought at the time that I would be a graphic designer for my career, and that databases were the most boring thing imaginable -- but I found out in short order that I really liked the idea of solving problems with the database. I found that it was more entertaining and interesting to me than the graphics arts career, so somehow I switched gears there.
"[After university] I worked with the Claris Corporation for about six and a half years as a customer advocate for the software platforms that Claris shipped. FileMaker really was a focus for me, I always loved the data platform, I thought it was terrific. So I left in 1996 to join a database systems consulting company that provided, amongst other things, software based on FileMaker to business clients around the United States. I did that for nearly five years, and came back to FileMaker Corporation in 2000. I've been here working with the business teams and the product teams since."
Software today
One of the motivations for
MacNN asking developers about their products was to get an insight into how they saw the whole software market today -- especially since there is generally a race to the bottom for pricing that makes high-value, high-cost software difficult to maintain. We've felt that FileMaker Pro has been somehow immune to this, and LeCates agrees -- but cautiously. "I don't know that we feel comfortable or immune: we're always trying to stay relevant and stay current, and deliver a platform that makes sense for our business customers, for teams of people that need to solve problems, so we spend a lot of energy on the product itself.
"Although we've been around a long time, it's by re-focusing on the product constantly. It's not so much that we're a bunch of old guys sitting around doing the same thing, and you're right that the software landscape has changed dramatically with the advent of mobility, and with the low-cost software that's available out there. Interestingly enough, we believe -- and I think this is playing out in our experience -- that custom software is still fundamentally important in business.
"When you're solving workflow problems at a team level, having an available platform to build custom software that meets your specific needs, that has the fingerprints of your organization and no other, is really fundamentally important. So we think our uniqueness, our competitive advantage remains, and hopefully we can have another 20-30 years doing this if we just stay focused."
The difficulties of selling solutions
Developers call databases "solutions" because they are usually made to solve a particular problem. That's very different to most software, where you buy the app and that's it, problem solved. With FileMaker Pro, you create your own solutions, so it seemed to us at
MacNN that the FileMaker company has to do two jobs when it's getting new customers: it has to sell them on the idea of creating solutions, then it has to sell them on the idea that FileMaker is how to do it.
"I think that's a very astute observation, and I would agree that it is a challenge," says LeCates. "You have to help someone understand that they have the capacity to self-solve a problem when they're not finding the right solution out there in the app eco system. Then you have to convince them that they can accomplish that with some effort, though hopefully not too much.
"We focus a lot on ease of use, but databases and apps are fairly complex, [sharing] the programming experience. FileMaker Pro is as easy as it gets to do what it does, but do you have to do some learning. So there is certainly an investment in drawing people in, but on the other hand we do have customers who are experienced developers from other platforms, and at a technological level FileMaker is a cakewalk. It's easy. So getting into the platform isn't that difficult.
"One of the other advantages we have, frankly, is the aforementioned community. We have experts who have been around for decades, and really understand what it takes to get up and running with the platform, and frankly are very sharing, very embracing of new folks who come in, and add insight and value. It is a challenge for us, but we need it and we're growing quite well these days, and it's great to see all the new energy that enters our FileMaker community."
The Future
The newest FileMaker product is a software development kit for iOS developers. "It's a new product in that it is a separate bundle that you get through our developer program -- we have something called the FDS or FileMaker Developer Subscription -- and for members that sign up for that, they can have access to this iOS app SDK. What it allows one to do is take the FileMaker solution, and instead of deploying it using FileMaker Go on iOS, you can essentially bundle it into an app. You could deploy for the App Store, but our fundamental reason for building this is to enable our customers who use Mobile Device Management in business environments to deploy easily to their iOS devices.
"We have many developers right now who are exploring this new tool and taking their apps, bundling it up for distribution in this way, and we think this is a big step forward. Our focus as a company in great part is about mobility and iOS specifically, and this particular tool is going to be a huge leap forward for a lot of customers."
-- William Gallagher (
@WGallagher)
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