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.