Oracle solutions are being highly embraced by all industries as they provide highly advanced technology applications to enhance enterprise level management. As these applications are cloud-based, they lead to secure and mobile environment, increasing flexibility and organizational efficiency.
The low-code enterprise rapid application development solution provided by FOEX GmbH enables anyone with basic PL/SQL knowledge to build large-scale web applications declaratively, allowing companies to perform the work easily and effectively. As an Oracle solution provider, FOEX offers the software tools that developers need to build complex business applications without having to go through expensive retraining for their developers.
About the Company
FOEX is a software development company based in Austria. The company has been founded in 2012 with a goal of improving developer productivity. It is specialized in developing plugins and add-ons for developers that work with Oracle Application Express (APEX) – a free development tool that comes together with the Oracle database.
As a software company, FOEX has its footprints in more than 45 countries worldwide and serves a broad spectrum of customers ranging from local organizations to Fortune 500 companies, across industries such as banking, healthcare, retail, public institutions, telecom, oil & gas, construction, e-commerce and insurance.
The main solution, FOEX Plugin Framework, provided by the company is a rapid application development tool that allows developers to build feature-rich, single-page business applications faster, whilst writing very little code themselves. Many companies use the tool to build complex systems (ERPs, CRMs, product inventory, etc.) and have seen significant improvements in terms of both the applications’ functionality and the development speed – on average, a 3-5x improvement in terms of development speed.
Innovative and Inspirational Leaders
FOEX was founded by Peter Raganitsch, who is serving as the CEO and Matt Nolan, currently fulfilling the responsibility of the CTO. Prior to founding the company, both Peter and Matt have been working for about 20 years as freelance developers using different Oracle technologies. They used third party plugins to build the software according to the customers’ requirements. Small projects required only a couple of plugins; however, things were more complicated whenever they needed to develop large-scale applications. In addition to using plugins there was a lot of custom code that had to be written for these applications and later on maintained by others.
Significant time was spent on just writing the code for these apps. That’s when they started searching for a tool that could take over this time-consuming task and allow both Peter and Matt to redirect some of that time towards tasks that could provide more value to customers. After research, they realized that no such tool existed and that’s what inspired them to start building their self-solution, the FOEX Plugin Framework – a tool that includes a large collection of components, more generically called plugins.
It’s been six years and FOEX continues to grow as a company and improve its solution, which grew from 60 plugins initially to almost 150 plugins today.
FOEX Plugin Framework
The FOEX Plugin Framework is a low-code rapid application development (RAD) tool that helps developers build enterprise-grade business applications using Oracle APEX and Sencha Ext JS. The FOEX team provides the essential building blocks so that anyone with basic PL/SQL and Oracle APEX knowledge is able to create both the client-side and server-side of large-scale web applications fast and with ease.
In addition to the main product FOEX also provides a couple of add-ons:
- Calendar Add-on which similar in functionality to Google’s calendar.
- Translation Add-on which enables users to provide multi-lingual applications with ease.
- Reporting Add-on which eases up the creation of reports based on the application’s data.
Benefits Across Various Organizational Levels
FOEX enables companies to develop mission-critical applications at a fraction of the cost that it would normally take them using other tools and technologies.
This translates into several benefits across different levels of the company:
- For Developers: FOEX’s software solution allows developers to build new types of applications that are not possible using Oracle APEX alone. It enables the users to build apps in a declarative way, clients can focus on developing the application’s business logic, instead of just writing custom code.
- For Managers: It enables them to keep their IT budgets under control. This means that not only clients can move forward with new projects and optimize IT spending, but due to the fact that the FOEX team provides pre-built components, users can also decrease the costs associated with the application’s maintenance.
- For Companies: Projects get to be implemented faster and with lower costs within the organization. This helps improve profitability, customer service and push for a higher market share.
From a human resources point of view, it is very easy to retrain the company’s existing IT workforce, as PL/SQL and a basic understanding of how Oracle APEX works is all that’s required to get started with the FOEX Plugin Framework. This means that a new FOEX customer doesn’t need to worry about expensive retraining programs or that it needs to hire additional developers.
Leader in the Oracle Space
FOEX is a developer-oriented company and understands what the customers need in order to become more productive for their organizations.
Internally, it strives to build a team of doers – people who are not afraid to roll up their sleeves and work on the things that matter. The development team is constantly looking to attract talented individuals that could help to achieve new levels of success in the upcoming years. Business-wise, one of the main advantages of having an international team is that they can build personalized relationships with the help of users.
FOEX’s next steps will be directed towards growth, both as a company and as a team. It aims to ramp up the business development activities in order to accelerate the growth of their customer base, enter new markets and expand the network of partners.
Furthermore, the Co-founders share, “We are constantly searching for the best fitting partners, who share our vision and want to add the FOEX Plugin Framework in their development toolkit. Our technology empowers them to deliver more projects on-time, improve profitability margins and bid (and win) higher value projects that otherwise would be out of reach using just their current internal resources.”
Technology-wise, FOEX team will continue to improve the solution and bring additional products to market in order to provide the right tools that help solve the demanding challenges existing in the enterprise application development space.
Advice to the Young Entrepreneurs
Numerous technologists aspire to become entrepreneurs. As Peter and Matt began their journey and started their own company to solve a major problem faced by software providers, they know exactly what it takes to build a successful venture. When asked about some advice they would like to give to the young generation, they share, “Whatever you do, do not lose focus of what your core business is. Finding the right niche on the market and identifying the channels which attract more customers is key to building a sustainable business, but try to make the difference between what is a must-have and what is a nice-to-have for your business.
There are many distractions along the way and one could easily get sidetracked. Always ensure that the outcome of your work will push your vision further and help achieve your goals..”
