Business Model

It has often been said that the software industry is a service industry masquerading as a manufacturing industry. This is meant in the sense that most software is under continual development and is never truly finished. Despite being placed shrinked-wrapped on the shelf there is always another version in the pipeline. Most products go through many versions with each adding more benefit to the customer and hopefully justifying the cost of buying the next version. Our intention is to try and make the service model more explicit. Rather than buying a shrinked-wrapped copy of a particular version we encourage you instead to rent the latest and greatest. This is a mutually beneficial arrangement which provides you with first class support and free upgrades and us with the prospect of a more predictable income. Our pricing structure reflects this aim, with the lease price less than the off the shelf price. In the future, if it proves viable, we hope to take the transition to a service oriented business one stage further by taking our product range open source with all the benefits that provides.

We believe in developing software in an open source manner. However, as a relatively young company, we are not currently in a position to go all out with an open source development. When our product base is wider and more entrenched in the market we should be able to make the transition to fully open source development. This has been shown to be achievable by service-oriented giants such as Red Hat. With this in mind our development effort is very much driven by the needs of our customers. Our feature lists and bug lists are open for all to see. Further we make the pledge that should the company for any reason fail the source code will be immediately released under the terms of an appropriate open source license (e.g. GNU public or GNU lesser as appropriate).