Zudy VINYL Reviews

We use VINYL quite a bit across the organization, such as creating apps for equity trade requests that everybody in the entire company uses if they want to get approval. We built an app and VINYL routes the approval to the person's manager. We also use it on the commercial side for CRM-related activities.

We augment our business process quite a lot with it.

It's in a private AWS environment at the moment that Zudy is hosting for us. We are going to move it to our own AWS environment shortly.

We literally have used it at a very tactical level, maybe improving integrations. We have used it in the commercial arena for things, like roster management and even for sales forces that might not fit into a traditional CRM model. We would have build-time front-ends for small groups who have a unique way of doing things. We will write back to the back-end CRM database. Then, we have deployed it quite a bit on the finance side of things. There is really no limit to how we have been able to leverage it. 

It's a great platform for business process improvement. The fact that you can connect to any data source really provides workflow approvals, etc., in a very timely way. This has really empowered us from an organizational perspective. We have incorporated hierarchy information so we can route things that need manager approval within the company. It has really facilitated a lot of business processes, where sometimes the core applications only get you about 80% of the way there.

We have built a guided buying application that guides people through the requisition process, which is just an easier experience than a lot of other things. The fact that it can connect to just about any data source has been a huge benefit for us. 

We helped our finance group with the management of POs, so people could get some visibility in terms of how much money was left on a PO, e.g., if they needed to close a particular PO or request another owner for a PO. The area of the procure-to-pay process was an opportunity for us. We used VINYL to develop a PO management app that has really helped facilitate and create transparency for people from a self-service perspective. With a click of a button, people can see the POs that they own, how much is left on them, and then take some action on them, whether it is closing the PO or requesting a different owner.

We have used it on the IT side of things just to help facilitate integration. Where we didn't necessarily build an app, we would move data, leveraging VINYL, from one system to another if we were having trouble with the integration. The ability to connect to a lot of different data sources in an easy way has really been a benefit both for building applications, but also for our infrastructure team when they are building integrations from point to point.

We use it for business process improvement things, like equity trade requests, where it is a one-off need but there isn't really a core application for it. Sometimes, a lot of those things prior to having an application in which to store everything, things could be stored in email and you have to go back and search for things. So, it can improve compliance and really just about any aspect of things. You don't need to do things out of the system. For a lot of the things that people do a lot of times in spreadsheets and organizations, VINYL is a great tool to eliminate a lot of that siloed data that ends up on somebody's hard drive that you can't find anymore. For us, it's really been invaluable. That is why I have used them for so long across both at my current organization and even at prior companies.

We leverage everything through an SSO provider. Depending on people's rights, they will either have the application within the VINYL tile within our SSO provider or they won't. The data is encrypted. It's really a comforting experience, which is very important nowadays with all the security risks that are out there.

It has just made us a more efficient company. It has even made us a more compliant company. We have been able to build business processes for things that could introduce compliance risk. Being able to do that quickly and efficiently without having to spend a lot of money on a custom solution, and the fact that it plugs into our infrastructure at this point and works across a variety of solutions, just works well for us. It has dramatically positioned our time to market.

Their ability to connect to just about any data source has been really invaluable. We leverage it in our finance area to help facilitate the processing of purchase requisitions, so it can connect to SAP and our contracting system.

It really makes opportunities limitless because you can connect to just about any system and/or application. What is nice about VINYL is you can create an app and not even necessarily need to take the data out of the source system. If you are creating a business process improvement application that reads data from a variety of different data sources, you can create a front-end to it and write back to those authoritative sources or systems of record without even moving data around. You can facilitate the improved business process with VINYL's ability to connect to a lot of different things, not creating multiple copies of the data, which is also a real benefit of VINYL.

I believe that we are on the latest version. I think it is awesome. Anytime you go into applications, especially low-code development applications, you can sometimes be restricted on how creative you can get with the UI. I think their new design really brings a lot more interest into the applications, where the sizzle is always important. When people are using applications, they like it to have a sleek look and feel. I think that the constant improvement in this area is always great.

Most of the apps that we deploy on the VINYL platform, we try to make them as low-touch or low-training as possible. We try to make them intuitive from an end-user perspective. That is really the value proposition there. If you can build things quickly in a very intuitive interface that drives value for your customers, the value proposition tends to go up a lot. Between the UI and design principles that the Zudy BAs always bring to the table, they really make that not an issue at all.

It really is a big deal, especially the fact that VINYL can connect to just about any data source. We don't need to necessarily replicate data into a data warehouse to do reporting analytics on things. We can leave the data where it sits. Whatever the authoritative system is of record, we can read from it, then write back to it, leveraging a pre-built front-end that we would put together with VINYL. It really creates a lot of flexibility in an organization where you wouldn't just get off-the-shelf software. Those things only get you so far. Because of the fact that VINYL can connect to a lot of different data sources, and just about any API, it gives you a great deal of flexibility. You are almost limited by your imagination, more than anything else.

It is really the benefit of the low-code development frameworks. You don't really need to be a software developer. You can work in the app and do more configuring of the application. You don't need to be a heavy-duty developer. In fact, we don't really have a traditional development organization because of VINYL.

Having been a customer of theirs for a long time, I think the UI needed improvements early on. But, they have done a remarkable job catching up in that regard. They have always been great at connecting to a variety of data sources. They are a leader in that space. They do a great job, from a business analyst perspective, helping you shape what the ultimate system is going to look like. There really aren't a lot of areas that need improvement. The areas that they have, they are keenly aware of and have made great strides in recent releases.

We have been using VINYL for about as long as I have been at my current organization. I've also used it at prior companies, but it's probably going on four years here.

It has been amazing. I don't know if it is how they manage and control their releases. This has become important, as you can imagine. With having very large communities of users and everybody in the company using the system, most systems have become mission-critical. We have had no outages that weren't unplanned. It doesn't mean you don't iterate on applications or work on improvements, but in terms of unplanned outages, it has been very small.

It is interesting because our challenge is managing. Because VINYL can be used across a variety of different use cases, just about any potential integration can be accommodated with VINYL and people are really only limited to their imagination. Sometimes, we have to manage the number of things that people want to create or build using VINYL. Sometimes, you don't want to just create things for the sake of creating it. Scalability-wise, we haven't had any issues. We have literally everybody in the company as a user of the application. There have been no issues in terms of simultaneous usage or any of those types of things.

There hasn't been a use case that has been too big or too small. We have done everything from mini CRMs for very niche field-facing teams to facilitating our procure-to-pay.

The usage has been organic. As more people become aware of its capabilities, with the capabilities of the VINYL platform and the capabilities of the Zudy business analysts, the growth has been organic. We haven't necessarily decided to scale up, but it is global for us. We are a global organization. We use it in other regions around the world as well. It is not like we are going to increase it by 50% or 60% each year. That is probably about what the increase has been, but it has been all organic based on demand and the value that people see.

Everybody in the organization uses it, from equity trade requests to some general onboarding HR-type experience. So, we have a very broad user base with the VINYL applications. On the IT side of things, the more traditional side of things, we probably have two or three people who use it. One person more on the integration side of things uses it, then we have people who are business-facing who are interacting with business partners to drive and build a lot of the applications. It depends on how you define using VINYL. As consumers of the application, just about everybody in the company does use it in some capacity.

They have been super helpful in just about every capacity. A lot of times, there will be challenges. We will go to them if we have an interesting challenge connecting to a particular vendor, but their support model has been great. Even more from an overall partnership, if there is anything that we need, we can certainly have the conversation with them. They are very open to facilitating and getting it done for us.

They are a great team to partner with, depending on the need or if something is coming up. I remember an instance early on when we were first becoming a commercial company. We had a need to create an application that would send text messages to hundreds of people in the organization when we got approval on what the next steps were. That was literally a phone call that I made one evening. By the next day, these guys were able to put together an application for me where we could use it in a production setting. It is that type of relationship and flexibility that the Zudy team and VINYL developers have. If you have a critical need, they will definitely work with you on what it is. They don't ever throw SLAs back in your face. They are a true partner in terms of that type of development.

I didn't use them before the company did. We had a strategy to help us augment limitations in our current cloud solutions. 

Where certain cloud providers are not going to give you the ability to change the platform, or it might take several years if they listen to your feedback, there might be real limitations in terms of what they do. Most of the off-the-shelf type cloud providers or cloud applications will get you about 80% of the way there from a business process. We use the Zudy team and VINYL product to close the gap and get us the remaining 20%.

Prior to using Zudy and the VINYL platform, I would be involved in a little bit more of your traditional development frameworks.

For the initial standup, Zudy was great in that regard. From signing contracts to having environments that stood up was probably three weeks total. That was back and forth, coordinating calendars, and everything else.

There are a couple aspects to it that work really well. Most low-code development platforms enable you to get something built relatively quickly, but when you couple that with the strong business analysts that Zudy provides, they tend to ask all the right questions when you are having those initial conversations. They quickly get to a minimal viable product that will allow the organization to react. Typically, it's like a week or two from initial conversation to having a minimal viable product, and then you can iterate on that. Just the fact that things are moving that quickly, I think it gives the organization a great deal of comfort. It is a dynamic that really improves customer satisfaction. It is not like a black hole, where you have a conversation, months go by before you see anything, and you are not given anything to react to.

The Zudy team was great in terms of being able to stand up an environment, then helping you build on it right from there. Every aspect of working with Zudy and the VINYL product is relative to most other interactions with other companies. You get to shave 50% to 60% of what you would traditionally expect off of the time that it takes to do things.

One of the things, we, as a company, rely quite a bit on managed service providers. Zudy, as a company, has really great business analysts who help in the development. When you couple that with a low-code development platform, the time to value is very quick and usually inexpensive, relative to many other applications.

They were great. They even hosted it initially for us. They worked with us on upgrades and moving it from a hosted AWS environment that they support for us to our own internal AWS environment. Even on the infrastructure and more technical side of things, they are a very supportive partner. 

We have people who interact internally with our business partners. However, the Zudy team provides the folks on the infrastructure side, if you want them to host it for you. If you're going to do it yourself, obviously you would need people to manage the environment, stand up the servers, and all the traditional things that you would think of just having to host an application internally. If you have the Zudy team do it, you really don't need any staff. They have a great managed services arm as well, where you can take advantage of their business analysts. They will help you and sit down with your customers to help build the applications. They ask questions about what it needs to integrate to. They also ask great business process questions.

ROI is always a hard thing to calculate. How do you put an ROI around being more compliant? It is just something that you have to do. If you don't, then you get in a lot of trouble potentially. Certainly, time to market is a huge value. However, doing things in a more compliant way is probably where you will see the value.

We benefit from the managed services that Zudy offers. The fact that it is a low-code development platform really gets us value pretty quickly, which is great from an IT perspective. It really drives a lot of value with our business partners.

The time to value with VINYL and Zudy business partners is probably 30% of what it would take with traditional applications. I think the low-code development platform really gets you to a minimal viable product very quickly, then you can iterate on that very quickly. Between that and having the business partners within Zudy to help drive a lot of these discussions and actually do the development for us, it has really been invaluable.

You get to a high quality application in a very short timeframe and relatively low costs without any measurable incremental headcount. Certainly, you need people to interact with the business and probably people to help point them in the right direction in terms of what APIs or data to get to. We haven't added any real headcount because of bringing the VINYL application into our environment.

It is great. We have been working with them on a model where you are not limited. You pay for the license, then you can use it as much as you want. For us, it has been very cost-effective. 

We also pay for the managed services help that we get from them. But, to me, it is a very effective cost model. Licenses are relatively inexpensive, then you pay by the drink in terms of the managed services that you are going to need, which has been great. We figure out where we want to apply those services and try to be pretty diligent about managing the costs there.

Literally, we have the license, which gives you unlimited use, and then we budget for anticipated services that we will leverage with them in terms of leveraging their managed services team to help build the apps and work with our business partners. Beyond that, there are zero hidden costs, which is great.

It is a crowded space. The Zudy VINYL platform has led the way in this space. When I compare it to other solutions, there are probably two things that stand out in my mind about why I am always drawn back to the Zudy partnership. Their ability to connect to just about any data source is huge. If you have a platform that can't connect to things, it really limits the usage of that particular platform. The managed services that you can leverage from Zudy are huge as well. A lot of times when you're standing these things up, you need support, strong BAs, and other things. It takes awhile to get adoption, if you think your team is just going to pick up a new platform, leverage it, and be really good at it. A lot of times, the inability to deliver something quickly will tend to make people not use it the next time.

The biggest benefit of the VINYL platform: There are a lot of low-code development tools out there, but VINYL has the ability to connect to just about any data source out there, if an API exists for it and can be leveraged. We have even partnered with them at times to work with third-party vendors to develop APIs on our own, if there wasn't an API that exists for it.

It is huge. Between UI improvements, the ability to connect to other data sources, or the ability to deploy truly mobile apps, it is that type of functionality that continues to keep the product relevant, especially in a relatively crowded space. There are a lot of people who try to use low-code development platforms, but the VINYL platform is very robust. When you combine that with the managed services that they offer and their continued development of the platform, it really makes them stand out.

It is probably close to 60% to 70% that you can deliver things quicker than you could with more traditional development frameworks or even low-code development frameworks, because there isn't really a limitation in terms of the number of tools or systems that VINYL can integrate with. You are not really limited. You don't need to find another solution or work out different integration capabilities when you're dealing with the VINYL platform. You are just limited more by your imagination than you are by any of the technical capabilities of the system.

It is really a great platform for all the things that you don't quite get out of cloud-based solutions.

They continue to iterate and improve the application. In one of the more recent releases, they came up with a mobile app in which you can build a VINYL application that you can deploy on mobile devices, just like you would from the App Store. 

Generally speaking, people pick it up pretty quickly. We tend to leverage a lot of the managed services within the Zudy team specifically for that because we're pretty partner dependent. But, it works well because they are able to do things so quickly. Our ability to go from concept to minimal viable product is pretty short, thus relatively inexpensive.

Having been a customer of the Zudy team for a really long time, it is always about adoption. Anytime you are introducing new technologies like this into an organization, people don't really quite understand what it is. You try and get your quick wins so people can see the value of it. Once you get past that, then you have the other lesson of how do you control growth, because you can connect to a lot of different things and people are very eager to find solutions to their problems. Sometimes, you have to manage what you are going to do and when you're going to do it, because no one has limitless resources. We, internally, establish a prioritization mechanism where we look at what is happening and where we should prioritize certain requests over others.

It is two-fold. There are a lot of low-code development platforms out in the market today, and you are going to see that a lot of them have value. Certainly, the number of data sources that they can integrate with is a huge piece of the decision-making factor, but then it is also the model. I have tried implementing tools like this in other companies, and it's not always easy to get adoption, even to get internal people comfortable with it and use it. If you can have someone who will partner with you in that journey and get your internal teams comfortable, and more importantly, get the business comfortable with the applications that you are delivering, then the adoption and value proposition go way up. It is really about the whole partnership, selection, etc., as you go through the process.

I wouldn't be with them this long if they weren't at least a strong nine (out of 10) for me. They are great. I wouldn't give anybody necessarily 10, but I would certainly give them a nine.

Our first use case for Zudy VINYL was actually to implement and automate workflows for some complex tasks with a lot of handoffs. One example was, as we onboarded a great number of employees at the late end of 2019 and early 2020, we had about 100 people who needed to be onboarded in a short timeframe. There were a lot of handoffs, people involved, and steps which could go off the rails if we didn't have some clear structure for how the handoffs would work. Using the Zudy VINYL platform, we were able to automate that workflow and make sure that everybody was on task and on point. We started to expand additional workflows from there, then we started getting into more custom applications for niche solutions and individual business problems that people were bringing to IT to solve.

One of the applications that we developed, and was completely custom, with the Zudy VINYL platform, was an integrated hub and integrated portal for our sales force. So, we have about 300 people as customers. We have essentially built a single point of entry for information, various applications, and subapplications that are also built on VINYL. But, the entire sales force can go in and have customized information, specific to the sales force and sometimes specific to them, right at their interface. Some of the things that they can do is receive specific communications that are categorized across different areas of marketing. They have access to custom applications, such as a digital detailing aid, that we used when we were still trying to stand up our CRM in the wake of the COVID transition, where they could access materials and detailing aids that they would put in front of their customers. They are also able to update some of their employee information, which integrates with our ADP system, as well as access videos and presentations, which different areas of marketing put out for them.

The integration is a huge accelerator into enabling new business processes. As a small company, we have a few different systems that otherwise couldn't talk to each other. We recognize, from an IT perspective, the value that data and change in status of certain data in one area could influence the ability to take action in another. With these integration points, we are able to essentially create that communication from one system to another, letting system B know that something has been completed or is ready in system A. That allows our users to know that they are ready to complete a task. Without that, we would be relying on a lot of manual communication. We would be relying on individuals sending emails, saying, "Hey, by the way, this is ready in system A." Now, we have the system recognizing it and shooting that email off automatically, with all the instructions necessary.

I like to think that the Zudy VINYL product is the perfect middleware for the different applications that we have scattered around our infrastructure. What I like about it is that we know how to use it to get one system to talk to another or pull information from multiple systems into one view for dashboarding, metrics, or reporting. Its ability to integrate with those various systems, and fill the white space between those systems where business users have needs, is really what has made it a differentiator in our organization.

We are using Zudy VINYL to fill white space between some of the existing business processes happening in systems that are already standing up. So, to say, "Is it running? Is it fully running back-end processes in the office?" We're not using it for that purpose, but the overall capability of the tool has certainly demonstrated it. Whereas, if we really wanted to jack up the amount we're putting in there, the sky is really the limit on what we could actually pull into VINYL and processes.

The most valuable feature within Zudy VINYL is just the ability to quickly, without having to worry about digging into code, put together user interfaces that match the business requirements and the user's expectation to do rapid deployment. A couple of the things that we really put to work in a lot of our applications are the use of structured communication and notification that is triggered by business events. So, when an activity is completed in the system, Zudy VINYL is able to integrate with our address book and Outlook to send the appropriate notices and deliverables to the people who need to use them next. Then, they can pick the task up without having to go back into the system to know that there is something on their plate.

Zudy is really easy to use. I am a non-developer myself, and I'm able to hang out in the conversations with our technical folks and Zudy consultants who drive a lot of the work development for us. The no-code/low-code platform is extremely intuitive. Our users are able to visualize solutioning. When we are working through an app, they are able to picture a way something would work. They are familiar with the ways Zudy might help them engage in the information that they want to work with. It has been a very easy conversation and easy development process, both within IT and with business customers.

The speed of development for custom applications has been incredibly rapid and really exceeded, not only IT's expectations, but the business users as well. Often, when we are bringing up or conceptualizing a new idea, two or three business days later, we have a conceptual prototype that we are able to put in front of our business users and start building from there. Many of our applications have only taken one to two weeks to stand up in a test environment and then have them deployed to production within about a week after that.

Zudy VINYL integrates really well through APIs and other data integrators. We have worked with about four or five other different systems that we have tied Zudy to, including Viva, ADP, and Oracle. I have yet to bring up a system where we have an idea for an interface, or an exchange of information, where we haven't figured out some way to make that connection, either through a direct API or by using a creative-like FTP process where we drop files someplace and have another system pick them up.

One of the features that they were able to add as part of a business need on the fly was the integration of DocuSign as well as an integration of an iPad touch signature pad. These were plugins that they were able to take, integrate with the tool as they built it, and we were able to create some cool stuff, like attestation forms or sign-off forms. Whereas, if we wanted to capture an official DocuSign signature, or just a scanned signature, we were able to take those tools, integrate them with a PDF presenter, and push electronic versions of forms out to people who they could then sign or acknowledge them right on their iPads. The system would save that as a final document that we could then archive. This wasn't an out-of-the-box feature that Zudy had, but by using the platform and pulling in other applications the way that we envisioned using them, we were able to create things that met our business needs.

During the initial rollout, the text editor wasn't 100% what we were looking for, but we were able to get the job done. After some discussions and finding ways to use different plugins during the short term, Zudy actually came back a few months later and said that they have integrated a standard product into their text editing that checked all the boxes for us. This has made it a lot easier to not only support the product, but to use it for new business ideas.

We've been using Zudy VINYL for a good two years. We started in the commercial space, but we have started to use Zudy VINYL across both our R&D and commercial business areas.

We have found the stability of the VINYL platform to be extremely reliable. We have had some point outages at times, where a plugin or something that interfaces with the VINYL platform went out on its own. Then, we experience that the employee portal or the app is down. After investigating, we found that the VINYL app was functioning perfectly. The challenges came into play when an integrated piece went out. So, I have no examples when the VINYL platform itself was out and causing business problems for us.

What scalability has meant for the field is that when we were shut down after the COVID pandemic hit, for example, we had to pivot very quickly to give our sales force a way to engage HCPs virtually when they were initially anticipating being out in the field and live with them. So, we were able to stand up products which helped them achieve that objective. We had short-term fixes for some of the other business challenges, but the most mission-critical one was to get out there and start selling and meeting our HCPs. Once we delivered that core capability, we were able to circle back, look at some of the secondary requirements, and start to deliver those. 

We actually built new features and built them right into the tools that the sales force was already used to accessing. They simply had either broader menus, more selections, or more options when they went in, but they never lost the core functionality. That was huge for us because we were able to get people out to the field quickly. Then, we took the things that were not critical paths and delivered them at the time that was right for them, instead of trying to wait until everything was ready, then deliver it as a single waterfall approach.

We have implemented close to 40 applications that have ranged from a huge multi-user system to simple business accelerators that help a small team do something in a new or more effective way. I don't see a real end to that as we grow and continue to evolve our processes.

Technical support has been great. I tend to work primarily with one or two consultants who are my interface to the team. Whenever we have issues that need to be investigated, they are interfacing on my behalf. We usually get answers within hours or within a business day or two.

Zudy continuously looks for feedback and takes learnings from the development that we are putting in place to figure out how to make the product better. Over the course of the relationship, I have seen two releases to a new version as well as some hotfixes that have been put in place specifically because of things that we found while we were developing. One example of that is a text editing feature they have. So, we have taken a lot of folks out of email and Outlook for their communications, giving them an interface in Zudy's VINYL platform to actually do their authoring, formatting, and things like that. While those messages ultimately push back out to Outlook to reach some of the users, the users don't have to write it in one place, then port it over to another.

There is nothing that I have really felt has been completely lacking from a Zudy perspective. Every time I have gone to the Zudy team and asked them for a read on being able to implement a certain feature or do something a certain way, there has always been a way to do it. That might be the limitation of our vision, but it seems to me that the tool and, in particular, the staff at Zudy, really understand how to use the tool creatively to address just about any business problem that I've had brought their way.

It took about three months to stand up all the features that we wanted in the sales employee portal. The first few features were developed in a matter of weeks, but as we identified different business requirements that we realized we wanted to enable for the field to use, we were able to quickly identify the requirements, build on the module, and tack it into the delivery workflow. So, the overall delivery of the portal, while stretching out over a course of several weeks, was actually a stack of different, smaller rollouts that each only took three to five weeks to develop.

If I had to think about it across the 40 applications, I am not even sure that I can give an order of magnitude. There is not only time and effort savings, but the ability to do something where we simply just couldn't do it. With COVID throwing everyone for a curve ball last March, there were simply things we weren't able to do. We didn't know how to visualize them. We had to stand up a commercial solution to address our sales force's needs. It would have taken more time than we would have wished in order to get our sales force out and selling. So, in addition to the time savings, the ability to enable people with an effective solution where there was really no alternative. Doing this quickly and effectively has really been the key value-add for my company using Zudy.

The Zudy VINYL platform is the primary solution that we evaluated for workflow automation. Once we brought the system and platform in-house, we found that we were able to use it for additional business needs where we might have otherwise gone out to market to look at commercial off-the-shelf systems for particular business needs that are not workflow oriented.

I haven't gone out to the market to look at a lot of competitors, but I can't imagine that any of them are going to blow my expectations away the way that the VINYL platform has.

The advice that I would give to someone whose thinking of implementing Zudy VINYL is, "Absolutely give it a really strong look. Speak to the Zudy staff about your particular business cases." I think that if you are using Excel spreadsheets or workflows that are primarily dependent on human manual communication, this solution will address so many of those needs. It is definitely a great application that we have brought in. I continue to find new uses for it on almost a daily basis.

The most recent version of Zudy Vinyl certainly brought a bunch of new things to the table. I think one of them was the text editor. I think that the general interface for Zudy, when you first come into the product to look for the different apps you've developed, is a little bit more intuitive and organized. We bypassed a lot of that with our employee portal, but when we do have to go out to that interface, it is easy to navigate.

On a scale of one to 10, I'm going to give them a 10 for what I need them to do. When I think about not just VINYL but Zudy as a service provider and partner, they are really checking all the boxes for us in terms of the human capital they bring to the table, the flexibility of the platform, and creativity. It is really doing everything for us that we would want it to do right now. 

We needed to replace a legacy payments system with a more advanced cloud-based payments hub. Due to contract requirements, we had less than 90 days to launch a brand new product. 

Our payment hub facilitates millions of dollars of payments in the B2B space. Vinyl allowed us to launch in the cloud in less than 60 days. The solution allows us to provide payment services to banks and corporations utilizing a single sign-on to manage vendors, payment files, and customers, all in a highly secure cloud-based database.

The solution needed to be able to support mass deployment to hundreds of companies with virtually no installation or training. With this goal, the product had to be very easy to use and very intuitive. So the User Interface was key.

We also had to meet the data security requirements of the banking world. Vinyl allowed us to launch in an AWS S3 environment and utilize all of Amazon's security features.

Vinyl has been a game changer in how we can now quickly deploy key features and new products. We no longer need five or more programmers taking months to complete a task. We can now say "we move at the speed of now" thanks to Zudy Vinyl. Our customers are impressed with how quickly we can make custom changes or customer-specific feature requests in days, not months.

Our employees love Vinyl as it is easy to use, and they see how our customers react with quick turnaround on feature sets.

The ability to connect easily to third-party APIs is critical in our business and is seamless in the Vinyl application. We are constantly adding new features by utilizing 3rd party providers, and Vinyl gives us a platform to easily make these connections. 

We also find making user interface changes based on customer feedback, and we can do these within a one-week turnaround. 

The biggest feature is that the support team is assigned to us. They really stand out. They understand our business in great detail, make recommendations, and helped build a great solution.

At this point, we have not found any limitations with Vinyl. They seem to stay one step ahead by coming out with new features regularly. These features are typically more technical in nature.

When designing the user interface, there are many built-in features; however, Vinyl could use some more extensive design elements that are used in marketing, such as Canva or Web design tools. These would allow for more extensive design elements to be added more easily. 

As one can expect, no one can know your business better than yourself, so testing and QA are crucial to success. Anything they can do to assist in this area would be a plus.

I've used the solution for six to nine months.

In the past six months, Vinyl has had 100% uptime. This product is used 24/7/365.

The scalability of this product seems to be limitless. One of our product requirements was to be able to mass enable hundreds of banks who, in turn, offer our solution to thousands of customers.

With limited engineering at our firm, we rely heavily on Zudy's team to help out when issues arise. 99% of the time, the issues are internal to us and not Zudy. However, they still are always willing to help until the problem is resolved. We could not ask for a better-assigned team of professionals.

Positive

We had an older product that was built in-house and was no longer flexible enough to keep up with the market requirements. We needed to upgrade our solution; the only way to do that was to start from scratch. We also need to have something live in 90 days which is unheard of.

Due to time constraints, we utilized Zudy's internal development team to provide the base setup, application details, and launch at AWS. It was extremely straightforward.

We utilized the Zudy Vinyl implementation team. We were assigned an application design engineer and two programmers. Their level of expertise was superior, and their attitude was perfect. We treated them as part of our own internal team.

Our ROI on the first release of Vinyl was visible in less than 60 days.

The licensing is very competitive and is based on a yearly fixed number. We wanted to be on a quarterly payment, and they made that happen. It is a very flexible organization.

We evaluated numerous alternatives, including Google, Microsoft, Caspio, and Quickbase. We chose Vinyl for several reasons, including the willingness to provide an application-specific demo. It had great pricing, and the sales and engineering team was there on day one.

Vinyl has been a game changer for our company and our customers. Having started over three tech firms in my career, I wish Vinyl was around a decade ago; we would have launched many more products.

At our company, we use Zudy VINYL to track, manage, and process incredibly large amounts of data. 

Users are importing large excel files (hundreds of thousands of rows of data) throughout the day while data manipulation and logical processing are happening behind the scenes. 

Our users do all of their work in the system we have built (with help from Zudy) and it all has to be very precise and accurate in order to comply with banking and legal court standards (the sector we work in), which it is. Many advanced and complex reports are created in VINYL for us, and it all runs much quicker and smoother than the solutions we were using prior.

Our company recently made the change from another low-code platform to increase functionality and support for our infrastructure. Zudy helped us make all of these changes and more, increasing the speed of our processes many times, as well as being available for constant support and weekly calls to ensure that our product is behaving as expected and helping to fix any bugs that are reported. Efficiency has skyrocketed thanks to Zudy. 

Reports and queries that used to take hours for us now only take minutes. In the consulting world, efficiency and effectiveness are key and Zudy has helped us to realize our visions of becoming the best in the industry when it comes to these. 

The ease of use moving around the platform cannot be understated. The main workbench page shows you the three layers you can work in (the 'Tables', the 'Business Rules', and the 'Pages') and it is very easy to see how data flows through the Tables to create the front-end panels and pages. The business rules are incredibly versatile and provide endless development tools as well. From any page on the front end, it is straightforward to click through the developer menu and see on the backend why specific data is/isn't appearing and why certain behaviors are occurring. From there, making adjustments to fit your needs is generally very easy.

The documentation isn't everything it could be, and the user forum is not always the most helpful. 

Our software is definitely making use of a lot of Zudy's 'cutting edge' functionality, thanks to development help from the Zudy team. The downside is that a lot of that functionality is not documented for users like myself (not on the Zudy team) who need to understand these functions. If these functions become part of a larger Zudy framework (which they claim it could be), I expect there will be plenty of documentation to follow.

Another thing I would love to do is be able to use SQL without needing to create a stored procedure. It seems to me that having SQL as a business object option would work as well. However, I could be wrong.

We've used the solution for one to two years.

So far, it has been very stable. Any issues that have arisen have been quickly fixed. We have great auditing features, allowing us to see whatever data we may need and how/when/why it was changed.

The product seems to be very scalable, from what I can tell.

We meet with the Zudy team twice a week to discuss bugs and enhancement requests, as well as receive updates about the underlying infrastructure and how it will affect our business. 

They are incredibly helpful and make our lives much easier.

Positive

I was brought in as our team was switching from another low-code platform to VINYL. I was told the other platform was much slower and offered much less support from a technical standpoint, which we definitely needed for our changing business needs.

We used a vendor team. The Zudy team is incredibly helpful and knowledgeable. We have bi-weekly calls with someone who has been working with us for at least one year now. 

We discuss any issues/requests/wishes with the Zudy team and they are very intelligent in how they make their recommendations. 

They can speak to the backend development logistics in ways that make decision-making for our team very easy and painless. 

They are clearly experts at the system and their ability to make changes on the fly is unparalleled. 

I was not employed with my current company during this decision-making process.

Zudy VINYL is a fantastic tool and can handle a lot of your business needs. There is a bit of a learning curve - although the training courses can be very helpful. Be sure to take and keep notes that you can refer back to as information is not always the easiest to come by. 

The primary use case for us is creating applications for business and manufacturing productivity.  We are a small to mid-size manufacturing company, and there are lots of processes and data collection that is made much easier with Vinyl apps.  

For example, we have an app that allows our quality team to run QC audits on our product and enter the results against targeted measurements. We now have a database of quality audits and can run actionable reports based on this data.  

When a quality team member has a suggestion for the app, there always seems to be a way in Vinyl to deliver the feature request.

We can take basically any manual data entry process that exists in the organization and replace it with a much easier-to-use Vinyl app.  

The data collection and reporting are much more robust than team-shared spreadsheets. Raw material receiving, quality auditing, and equipment utilization are all examples of processes greatly improved by Vinyl apps. We can even integrate with our ERP system by APIs and replace clunky ERP interfaces with much better Vinyl interfaces.  

I get constant feedback from users that it has made their life easier to use the Vinyl apps instead of the previous tool they used.

App development, database storage, and 3rd party app integrations are great. The low-code development makes data storage easy, and web-based apps are very customizable. The platform can connect to many third-party data sources.  

The training resources are also robust and allow for complete online training.  We have set up development, QA, and production environments to isolate our different processes safely.  

Vinyl makes it easy to push changes between the environments. So many out-of-the-box features work well with Vinyl. However, Zudy has also worked closely with us to create plugins and other features that meet our exact needs.

I don't have much to say about improvements. I am relatively new when it comes to the development of apps in Vinyl. I sometimes find formatting tricky to get the front end of an app the way I want it. That could be improved by a more intuitive use of themes.  

Overall, Vinyl does a very good job at what it is meant to do - low code development of apps. It helps to have a background in SQL. It is not necessary, however, as Vinyl shows you all the underlying data to the app under development. It has become an invaluable tool for our organization.

I have been using the solution for about six months, however, the company has been using it for longer.