maintenance, operation, and management of the Intellivenge system, Pocinwong says. He wouldn’t say how many people at Direct Technology are working on the Dendreon program, what they are doing to complement Dendreon’s internal staff, or how much the contract is worth. But he noted that Direct Technology’s Bellevue, WA, office has 40 employees, and even though it has some major corporate clients like the ones listed above, the Dendreon contract “is very significant for us.”
If there’s a common thread in what Direct Technology’s customers need, it boils down to keeping track of big customer bases with solid documentation, for a specific task that doesn’t come straight out of the box. A custom system, by definition, means that a customer uses about 90 to 100 percent of its features, instead of about 20 percent of the features packed into the usual out-of-the-box business software, Pocinwong says. For California 9-1-1, Direct Technology designed and implemented a system to track “ring times, talk times, hold times, transfers,” in order to help lawmakers measure how well the 9-1-1 was responding to citizen calls for help.
Armed with that information, the California 9-1-1 system was also able to spot patterns that have enabled first-responders to know how well they were doing their job compared with their stated goals, Pocinwong says.
Still, Intellivenge, like every project for a custom software developer, is different in its own way. The time to prove it works is now, as the FDA prepares to deliver its verdict on whether the product is ready for sale. And if it’s approved, Direct Technology will have to prove over time that it’s just as reliable as the California 9-1-1 experience indicates.
“Our responsibility is to make sure the system is up and operating,” Pocinwong says. “Those things are in place.”
