Anzan News

Savoy Selections at the UHBS

The Davis Conference Center in Layton, UT was the covenient location of the Utah Home Builders Show (UHBS) on April 7th and 8th of 2011 and Anzan was there to launch Savoy Selections.  This was the first marketing endeavor for Savoy Selections and all-in-all I would have to label it a success.  Our booth and give-aways, while leaving some room for improvement, really turned out great (a big thank you to our friends at Forthgear) and the feedback we received from builders and sub-contractors alike was quite promising.

Prior to the show, we sent out mailers to drum up some early interest.  The mailer promised a 25' tape measure to anyone who stopped by our booth and signed up to use Savoy Selections.  I have included pictures of the mailers and the tape measures we were giving out.  We ened up giving away tape measures to almost anyone who took the time to stop by and chat with us.  In hind sight, I realized that I failed to get our web site address printed on the mailer.

I am also including some pictures of our booth here so you can get an idea how we set it up.

We kept two computers fired up and connected to the Internet the entire time so we could give quick tours of Savoy Selections and sign customers up if they thought they would want to give it a try.  We kept the product up and running on the larger display in the center of the table at all times.  In addition to the tape measures we had 4" x 11" hand outs printed up and handed those out to everyone we could.

Everyone who stopped by the booth seemed to be in agreement that we have found an untapped niche market and a needed component of software for home builders.  It seems that the biggest barrier to Savoy Selections' success at this point is the dismal condition of the home building market.  Many of the builders we spoke with indicated that they did not currently have any jobs or that they are building at most one home a year.  Obviously we wished them the best and we were sure to point out our products low entry cost and low cost of continued usage.

All in all we came away from the 2011 UHBS with some great feedback and a handful of new users.  We are sure our new users will get some real value from Savoy Selections and hope that they will continue to provide us with valuable feedback.  Thank you to everyone who stopped by and visited us at the show and thank you for taking the time to read this synopsis.

Project for Marketing Firm

Near the middle of November, Anzan Technologies was contacted by a marketing firm that is local to the same area as is Anzan.  The marketing firm takes on work, from its own clients, that often involves web applications and e-commerce solutions.  Recently, the workload has exceeded the capacity of the firm's usual programming and software development resources and so they were seeking new resources.  Anzan Technologies was one of the considered resources.

The work awarded to Anzan was to develop a Ruby on Rails application that would be embeded within the client's web site.  The client's web site is an e-commerce enabled site constructed using a major, off-the-shelf, e-commerce/inventory management tool.  The Rails application was needed to collect details about orders that could not easily be managed by the existing site.  The details collected are delivered to the client via e-mail and related updates are pushed back in to the e-commerce enabled website.

First Savoy Selections User

Savoy Selections, Anzan Technologies' first product offering, has yet to be publicly released.  Before the product is released to the public Anzan plans to have a small number of users exercise the product and offer feedback.  Feedback will be used to improve the product and target initial marketing efforts.

At the time of writing, Anzan has signed up the first official Savoy Selections user.  The user is a custom home builder in the Layton, Utah area that has been, time and again, recognized for their attention to quality and customer service.  We are happy to consider this home builder a part of the Savoy Selections team.

Anzan is still looking for home builders who are willing to participate in the break-in process for Savoy Selections.  If you would be interested in trying out Savoy Selections on your next project please contact Jeremy Asbill at 801-678-1173.

New Web Site

Anzan Technologies is very pleased to introduce its new web site.  Anzan was started in early 2007 by a group of colleagues who all shared the same vague notion that they wanted to build a software development company that was different.  Exactly what we meant by "different," or even whether there was an exact meaning, is a topic for another discussion.  What's important here is that when we started, we weren't really sure where we were going.  Well we set up a web site which reflected that.  We bought the domains which matched our chosen company name and we set up a landing page which featured what I still feel is a very nice and professional logo...and nothing else.  Well, we weren't sure what we needed to say or who we needed to say it to, so, there it was.  Short and sweet.

Over the next year or two we began to dabble with a variety of things, one of which was bidding on local government contracts.  In December of 2008 we submitted a proposal which demanded that we have non-trivial, meaningful content on our web site.  So we designed a web site that would convey exactly what we needed to convey to be consistent and complimentary with our proposal.  We constructed the web site using Adobe Flex and deployed it before submitting the proposal.  Unfortunately, we did not win the contract, but at least our website advanced a bit as a result.

While the Flex-based web site conveyed some useful information for anyone who happened to come looking for us, it was not very useful for connecting with folks out there who were searching for software development companies.  Because the site was constructed strictly with Flex, it was all but invisible to the major web search engines.  Still, it has not been until recently that we have settled on exactly what it is that we should be promoting on our web site.  Over the last year or so (really since September of 2009), Anzan has focused on three things.  First, we have been developing our first software product, Savoy Selections.  Second, we have been designing, constructing, and deploying web sites for other businesses.  Third, we have been developing custom software under contract to other organizations.  It seems clear now that these three things should be promoted by our web site, but we also want the site to be something more.  Specifically, we want the web site to be a venue for discussions relating to all sorts and degrees of software development.  So, in addition to a set of largely static pages that promote our current business activities, we have also included a "blogging" engine that we plan to use to make anzantech.com that venue.

We hope you will spend some time and look around our new web site.  Like all software, it will never be finished, but we hope you will find something useful.  Visit our About Us page and feel free to contact us with any comments you might have regarding the site.  Thank you for visiting.