There’s always something pleasantly surprising or unexpected for end users when our customers develop enterprise software with Delphi, C++Builder or RAD Studio. For end users who have relied on software built with these tools for a decade or more, the advantages and benefits are even clearer.
In other words, the longer a company has used enterprise level software built with Delphi, C++Builder or RAD Studio, the more it understands the benefits it has enjoyed and the problems it has avoided.
So what do these companies love about the software that drives their business?
For some companies it’s the incredibly fast time-to-market that helps them maintain their competitive advantage by rolling out new products and updates fast as the market evolves.
For another it’s the single codebase and the compilers that generate native code for multiple platforms with a few clicks, saving them untold fortunes on development costs.
Others love the backward compatibility that allows them to modernize their code with little effort, sparing them the ordeal of making constant large expenditures just to keep up.
Ultimately, the comment thread between them is the core benefit everyone loves – lots of time and lots of money saved. How? With software that helps them remain competitive in times of fast growth, and helps them easily navigate through economic downturns.
For these companies the software they use, or the backbone of their business, is a blessing instead of the more commonly found financial burden.
If you love working with Delphi, C++Builder or RAD Studio, you’re not alone. In this blog post we highlight the successes five companies have had with Embarcadero tools, and their experience of what these tools have given them.
Table of Contents
1. Chonbuk National University Hospital, South Korea
With 1,1,50 beds, Chonbuk National University Hospital in South Korea offers emergency care, women’s health services, cardiology, orthopedic, and oncology services. Its personnel treat hundreds of thousands of inpatients and outpatients annually, and perform around 17,000 surgeries.
In 2013, the hospital introduced a comprehensive medical information service known as CUBIS. Its key components are the EMR (Electronic Medical Record), OCS (Order Communication System), and HIMIS (Hospital Integrated Management Information System). All were developed with Delphi.
Challenges
The goal for CUBIS was to create an application that was easy to use while minimizing maintenance costs. The application had to enable medical staff to quickly view a complete set of patient information on one screen while allowing them to perform other hospital tasks at the same time.
After evaluating a number of technologies, including web technologies, Java and .Net, the team concluded that these technologies would have produced a number of issues that were prevalent in systems used by other hospitals, such as inconsistent UI rendering, and degraded performance through reliance on overly complex technologies.
The hospital’s management team chose Delphi as the most reliable and problem-free technology. Using Delphi, Chonbuk National University Hospital built a system with advanced functionality and fast performance.
“Because Delphi runs natively on the Windows operating system, we were able to create an application with a highly functional user interface, which the medical team highlighted as a critical requirement at the start of this project,” says Sam-Kyeong Kim, IT Manager in the hospital’s, Department of Medical Information. “Selecting Delphi was an excellent choice for the CUBIS development team.”
Learn more about how Delphi is being implemented as a scripting engine on this article about MFL.
Outcomes
“CUBIS has received positive feedback from the medical staff due to its user-friendly interface which mimics the previous manual approach, Kim notes. “By not disrupting this process, but rather automating it, the system has significantly increased the medical staff’s productivity. It provides convenience and optimal performance, allowing for fast and stable treatment because it runs directly on the operating system.”
Delphi has also significantly reduced maintenance costs, Kim reports. “Delphi’s excellent framework resulted in high code reusability. After the completion of CUBIS, we were able to maintain the system independently with a small number of developers, while still providing high quality service.”
Read the complete case study here.
2. Image-Line Software, Belgium
Image-Line Software is the Belgium-based creator of FL Studio, one of the most popular Digital Audio Workstations (DAWs) available on the market for creating music.
Since its inception FL Studio has been downloaded more than 10 million installations a year by users in more than 200 countries. Some of its most loyal power users are world-renowned DJ’s, composers and musicians.
Challenges
Built with Delphi, FL Studio contains more than 2.5 million lines of code and more than 300 assembler functions for the digital signal processor.
Jean-Marie Cannie, CTO and Founder of Image-Line Software, says he had a long history working with Turbo Pascal prior to entering the music industry.
“Delphi is very important for us as a development tool because it allows us to do inline assembly and link function to the code directly. With classic development tools, that process is much clumsier. However with Delphi you can just add a button and double click; it speeds up coding and allows us to work in the language we know best.”
Outcomes
With Delphi, compilation and prototyping are faster and easier, Cannie says. “Delphi is really nice for us, because if you need native speed like we do, then the only other option is C++. Having worked with both, I find Delphi to be much more productive and easy to work with. For native development, Delphi is my first choice.”
“Having a product that runs natively on both Windows and MacOS without customers having to jump through hoops has the potential to grow our customer base significantly.”
Read the full case study here.
3. RockWare, Inc.
Colorado-based RockWare, Inc. creates and markets geo-scientific computer applications for industries that include oil & gas, aggregates, industrial minerals, uranium, coal bed gas methane, hydrology, civil engineering, and environmental.
RockWare also offers software training and project consulting services, while its sales team and consultants possess degrees in the earth sciences such as geochemistry, geology, hydrology.
RockWare has been using Embarcadero products for its application development needs for two decades. Its flagship geological modeling product, RockWorks, creates 3-dimensional geological models of the earth’s subsurface for customers in environmental (toxic cleanup, contamination audits), hydrogeology (surface and subsurface water), and industrial minerals (e.g. gypsum, sand gravel) segments.
RockWorks is the standard in the petroleum, environmental, geotechnical and mining industries for surface and subsurface data visualization, with popular tools such as maps, logs, cross sections, fence diagrams, solid models and volume calculations. RockWorks offers numerous options for analyzing your surface and subsurface data, and accepts many different data types, such as stratigraphy, lithology, downhole geochemistry / geophysics / geotechnical measurements, color intervals, fractures, and aquifer data.
Challenges
RockWare was originally focused on niche markets, but demand for its tools was growing exponentially. At one point RockWorks was selling 22 different software products.
RockWorks Director R&D and Lead Developer Jim Reed says “That’s when we realized we needed to consolidate everything into one product to reduce costs and improve efficiencies for our customers. That would require a tool that would allow us to do this effectively.”
The decision to consolidate led RockWare to choose Delphi, Reed explains. “Since then we have never looked back. Delphi allowed us to develop tools that show complex geological concepts and subsurface data in a format that can be easily understood by non-technical audiences.”
Outcomes
One of the key benefits of Delphi is that “It allows us to put in millions of lines of code and do it in an efficient way without maxing out memory,” Reed says. “Because of that, we can have a monster program that does 50 zillion different things, but can be downloaded comfortably in a reasonable amount of time.
Reed says the newest project is writing a new version of RockWorks that will involve an additional 1 million lines of code. “Embarcadero has grown with us to provide the platforms we need as our customer requirements expanded. All of Delphi’s wonderful tools got us over the fear of flying so we could start offering high level, complex, big modeling programs for large organizations that came with bigger requirements. That’s been a cool thing.”
When RockWare started out doing solid modeling it could take 15 days. “Today we do the same type of operation in 26 seconds. Delphi’s multithreading has been a tremendous breakthrough for us. We have one customer that uses 64 processors on big projects. Our application can automatically scale to take advantage of processors, which takes the burden off us. We don’t have to manage it – it’s all automatic.”
“Every day I still look forward to using Delphi.”
Read the full case study here.
4. Getinge Infection Control
Getinge AB is a publicly listed Swedish group of companies with three business areas, one of which is Getinge Infection Control, which provides Healthcare (infection control solutions) and Life Science (contamination prevention solutions).
IT development for Getinge Infection Control is based in Copenhagen, Denmark. Its flagship product is T-DOC, an ERP and stock control solution for sterile supply management, traceability and billing that is used in 1,200 hospitals in 44 countries and available in 26 languages.
Challenges
Demand from the healthcare sector for logistics and resource processing capabilities has grown exponentially since the company introduced its first product to market in 1996, says Chief Architect, Lars Sondergaard. “Hospitals are like a big factory that runs 24/7 and uses thousands of instruments. Real-time data logging of equipment and supplies is an increasingly critical need.”
With four million lines of source code and growing, Sondergaard says it is imperative that T-DOC development is streamlined and efficient. That is why it has been working with Embarcadero Technologies’ Delphi software development platform throughout their expansion.
Outcomes
The key selling points for Sondergaard are the fact that Delphi uses the same code base and offers backward compatibility.
“We have never had to rewrite the T-DOC system even when something new comes along, which makes it easier and faster for our staff. That’s one of the good things about choosing Delphi.”
“With Delphi we’ve been able to grow our ERP system from a small to a very, very big system using the same tool all the way. Nothing out there has ever compelled us to change to any other tool.”
– Lars Sondergaard, Chief Architect
Read the complete case study here.
5. Hitachi Healthcare Systems
These days, if you see an X-ray at a dentist’s office, it’s almost always on a monitor screen. DELTA View, a system developed by Hitachi Medical Computer Systems, dramatically improves the usability of such image viewers.
DELTA View makes it possible to retrieve the information needed for all aspects of patient treatment quickly and intuitively and to display this information appropriately.
Many current dental treatment applications tend to have a certain Windows-like look, with blue windows, white backgrounds, and black text. DELTA View’s black-colored theme is smart and elegant—”stylish,” according to dentists. To allow users to complete operations with minimal movement, DELTA View features a flick-type operation, like a tablet or smartphone. This feature was developed in anticipation of the release of an iPad version in addition to the Windows version.
In developing these user interfaces, Hitachi Medical Computer Systems utilized the most of the multi-platform FireMonkey application framework. The FireMonkey framework absorbs the differences between platforms, allowing use of the same codebase for the Windows and iPad versions.
Many current dental treatment applications tend to have a certain Windows-like look, with blue windows, white backgrounds, and black text. DELTA View’s black-colored theme is smart and elegant—”stylish,” according to dentists. To allow users to complete operations with minimal movement, DELTA View features a flick-type operation, like a tablet or smartphone. This feature was developed in anticipation of the release of an iPad version in addition to the Windows version.
In developing these user interfaces, Hitachi Medical Computer Systems utilized the most of the multi-platform FireMonkey application framework. The FireMonkey framework absorbs the differences between platforms, allowing use of the same codebase for the Windows and iPad versions.
“Using the existing Windows codebase, we needed just one month to get to the stage of having a running iPad app.” – Shinya TAKAYANAGI, Hitachi Medical Computer Systems, Inc.
Outcomes
The benefits of using Delphi are visible not just in the high-performance user interface, but in the dramatic productivity improvements made possible by component-based visual development. “The time required to develop the image viewer portion was about a month, a third of the expected time,” recalled Noriaki Arizumi, General Manager of the Hitachi Medical Computer Systems Dentistry Development Department. “During that time, we were also dealing with the biennial revision of the medical fee, so the time constraint was a lot tighter than for an ordinary project.”
Mr. Arizumi said, “Delphi is being fully utilized throughout the Dentistry Development Department. Several projects based on Delphi are underway right now, all relying on the high productivity and multi-platform approach made possible by Delphi.”
“The development concept for DELTA View was intuitive ease of use, without manuals,” said Shinya Takayanagi, who oversaw development at Hitachi Medical Computer Systems. “Only by combining Delphi and FireMonkey could we have achieved our goal.”
Read the complete case study here.
There’s so Much More
These are just five of the many success stories built on Delphi, C++Builder and RAD Studio. Explore them on this page.
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