Focusing on Problem Solvers
In today’s Claris webinar, CEO Brad Freitag started by saying that “Problem solvers are our ecosystem,” giving a shout out to the all-in Claris community of developers and consulting businesses. He and his team detailed a new licensing program, shared additions to the platform, and discussed the future. Here are three notable takeaways:
Claris Studio: The next piece of the puzzle
First, Claris is releasing a new product. Peter Nelson, VP of Engineering, referred to his webinar from 8 months ago, where he talked about “New Stuff.” Today, they announced its official name: Claris Studio, available this fall. What we know as Connect today will be folded into Studio. Claris Studio promises to be a modern web experience designed to work with the current Claris products. In this first release, Studio will feature User Views, dashboards, and centralized log-ins.
Hubs are a collection of views grouped to complete a workflow. You can think of a hub as a curated way to fill out a sales order or navigate a user through a process to submit a work order.
Dashboards will help show data from both Pro and Studio, meaning that the platform is connected and not just disconnected pieces under a single umbrella. In other words, Claris is focused on a unified, cohesive platform.
Anonymous views will allow companies to collect data from a larger, non-licensed audience. This is one of the biggest differentiators for Claris Studio and something more challenging to do in FileMaker in its current state. Hopefully, this addition better guides users through workflows like collecting repair orders from tenants or service requests from customers.
Centralized identity management is a big win coming out of this announcement. Having a single-stop location for user management will be a time saver and modernizes development.
The Claris team mentioned their focus on delivering, and Day 1 of Claris Studio will be cloud-only. Their focus is on getting out to data centers across the globe. However, on-premise deployment is not lost on them and is likely part of their more extensive roadmap.
A developer preview of Claris Studio is coming soon!
Claris: one platform, one license.
Second, Claris is continuing to evolve and lean into its brand. Claris Studio will join other existing products under a unified Claris banner. Existing products will be renamed as Claris Pro, Claris Go, and Claris Server. Along with this platform vision, Claris will be moving from licensing their ‘binaries’ to licensing for usage — a subscription licensing model based on deployments. In short, Claris wants to make it free to use and create, and charge for what you share with the world.
Along with this new platform strategy and vision, Claris announced a new program for customers and developers. They call it the Claris Problem Solvers Circle. This program involves a two-year agreement to allow time to try, deploy, and benefit from the entire platform. After two years, customer pricing will increase, but the goal is that the technology will prove its value within businesses.
This program will be available for 500 existing customers at a 30% pricing increase from their current licensing. If you’re interested and want to learn more, check out the information on Claris’ website. Reach out to us at Proof+Geist to discuss what this might look like for you, both short-term and long-term.
Andrew LeCates, Director of Platform Evangelism, says the program is an experiment that they are excited to try, and quite frankly, so are we. This program is a great way to prove how strong, creative, and flexible this technology really is. We are excited to help define the value proposition of the Claris platform.
What about FileMaker Pro?
Third, Claris continues to invest heavily in FileMaker Pro (Claris Pro). FileMaker 19.5 is coming soon, and Peter Nelson shared his excitement about its release. It’ll have significant features for Pro and Server. We will post more on these new features once they’re released.
FileMaker 19.6 is also in the works with exciting features, like scripted transactions (Todd Geist has an extraordinary level of joy for this) and user group management with OAuth.
Pro soon to include a freemium version
Claris is focusing on new adopters, offering a freemium version of Claris Pro. This also includes access to Claris Studio. A paid license will be required to deploy a solution to multiple users, but the free version opens the door to try out the software.
We will share as we know more about getting your hands on the freemium version.
What’s Proof+Geist’s take on it?
We’re all in.
This webinar made it clear that Claris is focusing on delivering a modern platform that brings existing technology in line with the future of the platform. We recently waxed philosophical on The Context Podcast about just this topic: what makes for Modern FileMaker and how it fits into modern businesses.
Is Fortune 500 the goal for the Claris platform? Maybe adjacently. Strategically, the Claris platform is best suited for small to medium-sized companies, along with government and school entities. But are they in Fortune 500 companies? Absolutely. This platform is alive and growing and finds itself in businesses across the globe.
“Build, test, and iterate” — a mantra at the core of our practice at Proof+Geist — is a mission for Claris, so they will share more as they make progress on these changes. And we’re here for it. We hope you’ll join us for the ride!
You can find the announcement in the Claris community here.