I am General Manager of Di Marca, a brand design agency based in Melbourne, Australia. We specialize in corporate design communications ranging from corporate identity systems, collateral, website design and programming, exhibition design and production and brand strategy.

I prepared this summary as part of our support for the nomination for an innovation award.

Di Marca has been a client of once:technologies for 10 years, migrating in 2006 from an earlier FileMaker Pro system to once:fabrik. Being an early adopter of the new technology, we have been a key contributor to the evolution of the technology.

The once:radix technology is the most current and forward thinking development solution in many years. Through the willingness of once:technologies to listen and respond to our experience and that of other early adopters, its functionality has increased considerably.

There are workflow and business management programs available on the market but they are not as comprehensive, intuitive or flexible to individual configuration requirements as once:fabrik is. Other available solutions don’t integrate all of the functionality needed to be a complete solution. i.e. combining workflow, production, finance and reporting capabilities.

The once:radix engine is a web-based technology that is far more cost effective and innovative for both the end-user and developer because updates, testing and servicing are immediate.

once:fabrik is used by our whole company. Being web-based, updates are easy to roll out with no user downtime. We’re also able to customize and develop reporting based on our individual requirements as a company. For the first time, we have access to data from all facets of the company within one program and are able to generate reports that demonstrate overall company productivity.

We aren’t IT professionals, but we work with high-end web developers who are. They have been impressed with the technology due to the innovative use of the programming, language and design approach used.

We are completely satisfied with the usability and effectiveness of the product and continue to find new ways that it can help our business.

We have found that our business systems have gone to a new level of efficiency, with a positive effect on our bottom line.

We believe that this technology has huge potential for any business as it has the flexibilty to deal with all types of workflow and production issues. This would include industries such as Advertising, Graphic Design, Architecture, Marketing, PR as well as other service-based and product-based businesses.

This technology focuses the operation of a business at one central hub for the collection and dissemination of information and control. This is important for any business, regardless of size.

After carefully considering our own requirements and finding that so much was lacking in the technologies that powered other solutions, we believed and continue to believe that once:fabrik is a unique and affordable solution for any business, regardless of its size.

I just visited the demonstration of once:fabrik. It is a big system. It will take some effort to learn all of its features, but I was able to set up a job and use most of its parts after about 15 minutes.

This system has everything. I think it is the best Web 2.0 system I've seen.

It shows how to combine some of the best available open source software. I believe it has PostgreSQL, Mozilla Firefox, Camino and Rhino, Apache Tomcat and Lucene, JasperReports and iReport.

But the way they build the system inside their once:radix IDE look a smart way to build applications. And they do it all inside a Web 2.0 paradigm.

What I liked most about once:fabrik is the way most information is entered once, then it's used over and over.