About Appercept

The problem

In a previous role as Lead API Engineer at CrowdLab, a market research platform, Richard's team hit a wall. A company restructure wiped out most of the mobile engineering team. The remaining developer was under pressure to maintain separate native Android and iOS codebases. He left. His replacement was junior-level, but that was the market at the time.

The product manager asked the engineering teams for a drastic solution: if the current native approach wasn't sustainable, what were the alternatives? Everyone was talking about single-codebase, deploy-everywhere frameworks. The team drew up a shortlist.

Richard added Delphi. He'd worked with it since his first programming job, and the product manager was open to it, having worked with Delphi teams before. On paper, it was a strong candidate.

It was struck off almost immediately. The reason: no serious AWS support. CrowdLab relied heavily on AWS. The mobile apps uploaded voice recordings, videos, and photos to S3. The built-in cloud components in Delphi were incomplete, and the open-source alternatives were worse. Delphi simply couldn't talk to AWS in any reliable way.

The light-bulb moment

CrowdLab moved on without Delphi, but the problem stuck. Other teams must be hitting the same wall. And it wasn't just startups. Enterprises run Delphi applications everywhere, and when someone higher up decides "we're moving to AWS," those developers get left out in the cold.

So Richard set out to build a first-class AWS SDK for Delphi.

Embarcadero came knocking

After demoing the SDK to Marco Cantù, David Millington, and Kyle Wheeler at Embarcadero, they were impressed enough to license it for inclusion with RAD Studio Enterprise and Architect subscriptions. That partnership ran for four years. The first two years were exclusive; for the second two, Embarcadero encouraged Richard to start selling it commercially.

The AWS SDK for Delphi is now available directly from Appercept with Individual, Team, and Volume licensing options. We also offer consultancy for teams moving Delphi applications to AWS.