KiZAN Develops in Half the Time with Telerik Platform

Telerik customer KiZAN has rapidly built apps for multiple platforms with Telerik technologies.

A Telerik customer for five years, KiZAN works with businesses and organizations from startups to large enterprises to help them innovate with custom software solutions. KiZAN uses the Telerik Platform, Telerik^® NativeScript^™ and the Telerik^® Kendo UI^® framework. Additionally, the KiZAN team has used Telerik Screen Builder to mock up and provide interactive user experiences with mobile solutions before delivering them directly to customers. 

“We have hundreds of customers we deal with, so we built hundreds of solutions,” said Mike Branstein, head of custom application development at KiZAN. Branstein’s team develops apps from scratch applications, he said, and often works with organizations to modernize their applications as well. Clients rely on KiZAN to be experts in web development and new technologies, and Telerik helps them stay ahead of the curve.

According to Branstein, modernizing apps has unique challenges. “We’re working with legacy code and legacy technologies, and we still have to plan for a modern environment where we need a mobile solution, a web solution and cross-platform solutions,” he said. “We chose Telerik Kendo UI because it just works. The API is fluid and easy to use, and the support and documentation far exceed all other competitors in the field.”

Branstein estimates approximately 500,000 users regularly use applications KiZAN has developed using Kendo UI framework in education, healthcare, the public sector and nonprofit organizations.

How the Telerik Platform Changes the Game

Having had success with Kendo UI framework, Branstein’s team selected Telerik Platform over other mobile app development platforms. “Telerik Platform and NativeScript enable us to build cross-platform mobile apps from prototyping all the way to deploying solutions,” he said. “It’s a single solution that enables us to innovate and spend less time on developing for individual platforms.”

Although Branstein recognized that other solutions also enable cross-platform development of hybrid mobile apps, he said that usually there are performance concerns. Applications run slow or they don’t update quickly, which can incite negative feedback from their users. “With NativeScript, we can build it once, but target native development for the various platforms to eliminate performance issues,” he said. “Code runs fast across all platforms, and it’s dependable.”

Branstein said other solutions may be as feature-rich, but documentation and guidance is nonexistent. Not so with Telerik Platform. “The support and documentation Telerik makes available to developers far surpasses any other solution,” he said.

Telerik Platform Helps KiZAN Slash Development Time by 60 Percent

With Telerik Platform and NativeScript, Branstein’s team has been able to reduce development time by approximately 60 percent, because they can develop once for multiple platforms. “Typically, one of the biggest challenges with cross-platform development is learning the various languages—Objective C or Swift for iOS, Java for Android, and C# and XAML for Windows Phone,” he said. But Telerik Platform allows Branstein’s team to leverage what they already know—HTML 5, JavaScript and CSS. 

Additionally, it has changed the way the company works with new clients, even enabling a new business offering—a two-week engagement Branstein calls a “mobile app quick start.”

“We start off with stakeholder interviews and, using Telerik Platform, we can engage [our customers] directly to show concrete user experience mockups and functional designs,” he said. “We then flesh out the backend technical coding, and quickly deploy the app to mobile devices for testing. It enables us to quickly prototype a solution, incorporate client feedback and move to coding in a very short time period.”

But Branstein said the true power of the Platform is in deployment. “With Telerik Platform, we’re able to deploy to multiple platforms in a very seamless and streamlined manner and that management and deployment time is reduced by as much as 80 percent–and we’re able to target private app stores at the same time.”

Telerik Platform Solutions at Work

Using Telerik Platform, Branstein’s team has developed several solutions:

• Time Tracking: A manufacturing firm had previously relied on a Microsoft Access database for time entry. But with several remote offices and only one employee able to access the database at a time, Access wasn’t scalable. KiZAN designed a mobile app enabling users to enter time simultaneously from wherever they are, improving payroll processing and accuracy.
• Healthcare management: Start-up Sleep Access took advantage of a change in U.S. law that required truck drivers to have sleep apnea testing. KiZAN worked with the company to develop a custom portal for sleep apnea disease management and wellness, so truck drivers and trucking companies can have a single place to connect with doctors.
• Waste management: A large drapery manufacturing company wanted to reduce labor and materials waste, and KiZAN used Telerik Platform to build a solution for optimizing the company’s workflow to reduce the amount of scrap waste.

Branstein said KiZAN’s relationship with Telerik is based upon trust and dependability. “We know that Telerik is going to help us continue to be ahead of the curve in technology,” he said. “We look towards Telerik to design and develop solutions that we can continuously use to ensure that we’re providing the best solution to our customers at the lowest price possible.”

Learn More about Telerik Platform Enterprise Edition

To take a deep dive into all the features and benefits of the new Telerik Platform Enterprise Edition, please register for the next Telerik webinar, “Enterprise Mobility. Unshackled.”

Visit the Telerik Platform Enterprise Edition website for more information.