Working with competitors

There are a lot of times when we work on similar products which compete with each other. Quite a few of our customers have raised concerns about the secrecy of their ideas, business plans, development speed etc. and we realize that this is a very sensitive and important issue. Potentially, if a competitor knows enough information about a product, he/she can speed up development, modify his/her own feature-set etc. So how are we dealing with this?

Firstly, we do NOT disclose any information to any competing client whether it’s about feature set, or about release plan etc.

Secondly, we do inform our customers that we are doing “similar” work with other customers and we won’t be sharing information.

Thirdly, we do NOT share the code base between projects. Actually this doesn’t matter too much when you are doing a framework-based development (phpCake, codeignitor etc) as code is not really important – the idea and the marketing effort that goes with a product is!

We are currently working on quite a few competing products ranging from media sharing portals, social networking portals, file sharing portals etc to desktop applications and we have not released any information to anyone – not even the information that’s already publically available.

We realize that as our customer base grows we are bound to come across more competing ideas and products. We have developed processes to ensure that we don’t release any information to the competitors and also do the development of competing products in parallel without affecting each other. We are proud to be the pioneers in our industry to pro-actively address this issue and make sure that our clients can build a relationship based on trust with us.

Germany updates

It’s been a while since we updated our blog. During the past month or so, we have signed partnership deals with various firms in Bavaria, Hesse, Baden-Württemberg, and Nordrhein-Westfalen. We are now working with some of the largest advertising and media companies and are currently talking to the software arm of one of the largest automobiles firms in Germany.

On the other hand, our on-going projects with German customers have gone to completion smoothly with a few (expected) hiccups. We have improved our processes and communication structures and are now delivering better support and quality to our customers.

So what are we doing now? We have setup an office in Frankfurt (along with one of our partners), starting our own GmbH and will be hiring local staff to provide better support to the customers. All our perspective clients can contact us to know more about our existing customers and their experiences. We are looking forward to create more value with our German partners and customers.