The classic 20th century view of enterprise software products involves a team developing a very valuable application which then is offered to multiple clients through an expensive selling process. Eventually, after years of brand building, product enhancements and sales, the licence fees from the product sales begin to get you profits.
This still works in the 21st century, but there are other business strategies. And for software services companies, building open source products is an awesome strategy.
Products become a technology showcase to convince our clients about our capabilities.In our case, our open source products can be installed and tested by our clients without our involvement, thus deepening our brand credibility. The full source code is available on GitHub, and all documentation is on our website. In some sense, our products are our calling card to start our conversation with new prospects.
Products act as focal points for concrete opportunities. Our products are an excellent fit for large business application stacks. Many clients hear about IDshield and connect it with their need for a single sign-on portal. Or they have been struggling with their forensics and audit challenges, and find our LogHarbour very relevant. Discussions remain focused, and opportunities qualify faster. In an industry where first contact to concrete PO can take a year, this is a huge blessing. If we had approached them with just custom software development capabilities, our story would have been less topical, and the discussion would have meandered.
Our product track record helps us attract the best talent. The most ambitious and competent engineers in the industry rarely find it fulfilling working in the services sector, moving from project to project. But with our products, they get a taste of the technical depth, the latest tech stacks, and the best tools and processes which only the product eco-system offers them for their technical growth.
Last but not least, all our products are available for us by our project delivery teams. Wherever possible, our project teams incorporate our tried and tested, scalable, up-to-date products as key components into our solutions. This reduces delivery risk, increases project quality, reduces time to go-live, and ploughs back learnings which trigger virtuous cycle of improving our products.
