About Iron Speed

Software development tools for database and reporting applications

With products built on decades of experience in enterprise application development and large-scale e-commerce systems, Iron Speed products eliminate the need for developers to choose between "full featured" and "on schedule."

Iron Speed was founded in 1999 by several strategic investors and executives from AMD, Excelan, Onsale, and Oracle.

Our story

Back in 1995, my partners and I launched Onsale, an online auction house and e-commerce website selling excess and out-of-stock merchandise. By the end of 1999, we had grown the company to a run rate of over $600M in annual sales.

In the early days, we thought an e-commerce operation would be like a mail order business, minus the telephone operators. Our software would simply replace order takers and customer service representatives. We thought it would take no more than five or ten engineers to build and manage the whole thing. “How complex can this software be?” After all, e-commerce is basically a database application – a set of Web pages, input forms, and SQL queries.

It grew into a giant Web-based ERP system, perhaps the first of its kind. Everything was heavily automated, from order entry to fulfillment to vendor management. It worked like a charm, handling daily over 12,000 orders, 500,000 customer transactions, and 75,000 email updates.

But we also had a big problem. Our IT staff ballooned to 110 people – way more than the 10 engineers we originally anticipated. Our system had 65 different software modules handling everything from order taking to bid tracking to email notification to supplier inventory management and customer service requests. And every one of those 65 modules was constantly evolving along with the business. In short, we were drowning in code – over one million lines of it!

Along the way, we began to realize the vast majority of our code was pretty straightforward, mostly moving data between Web pages and databases. Only a small fraction of our code – maybe 20,000 lines – was truly the "secret sauce" behind our operation.

A company is born
So an idea was born…and a new company – Iron Speed – founded on the idea of building applications without programming. How is this possible? Quite simply, we figured out how to create complete feature-rich applications without programming!

Our flagship product, Iron Speed Designer, is the quickest way to build database applications for the Web, Cloud, Mobile and SharePoint environments. Simply point to an existing database and let Iron Speed Designer create a visually stunning, feature-rich Web 2.0 interface that is easy to customize and ready to deploy.

You won’t need to hire a graphic designer to make your Web applications look good. We already did that! What’s more, you can customize our page styles or create your own if you have a standard corporate look and feel.

Your applications will have sophisticated master-detail pages, reports and workflow pages. They’ll also have built-in enterprise-class application security and data integration features for further analysis and reporting.

A happy ending
Our story has a happy ending. Not only did we develop a tool that saves you thousands of dollars and weeks of time, but we use Iron Speed Designer to manage our own business as well. We eat our own cooking! Our company, Iron Speed, Inc., runs entirely on “Nexus”, a suite of database-driven Web applications that handles thousands of transactions per month and contains millions of rows of data.

The real litmus test is how many engineers we devote to building and enhancing our Nexus application: one! That’s all, just one engineer who works on Nexus part-time.