About 5 years back, we realised the value and power of open source software as a means of delivering business websites / applications. As that was our first exposure of working with open source software, we started our first project with Mambo CMS. It was a tremendous learning experience for us since prior to that we were used to developing custom web applications. Our clients were very pleased with the work as we delivered a powerful and easy to use web application in practically a couple of days. It is at that time we decided to focus all our energies on open source development i.e. develop web applications and websites using open source software.

In our opinion the use of Open Source Software had the following benefits for us and our clients: Stable, fully tested and powerful base application Base Applications capabilities were extended by community contributed modules / add-ons. The resultant application was fully modular and new modules could be added to the application without disturbing the existing architecture. Significant reduction in the time taken to deliver the project. And since time is money, it meant lower software costs for our clients. Since the application was developed using open source, the cost of running, hosting and maintaining the application was far less than applications developed using proprietary technologies. Since the application was modular, the base application could be upgraded when a new version was released. This implied all new features and security issues were taken care of automatically.

All in all this was a win-win strategy for both us and our clients.

Over these years we have worked with several Open Source Applications like Mambo, Joomla, Drupal, OSCommerce, Zen Cart, Magento, Open Cart, phpCOllab, WordPress, phpBB, b2Evolution and the latest Concrete5. Because of our long experience of working with Open Source software, our learning curve of working with a new application is very small.