Our Strengths

We're a company that works like a wiki...

Straight talking

If you're looking for a company that just says "Yes" to everything, you've come to the wrong place.

If we don't know something, we'll say so. If we think what you are doing is bonkers, we'll say so. If we make a mistake, we don't try and cover it up (the time is better spent on fixing it). Life's so much easier when you talk straight!

We believe in a transparent, informative process where we will talk as simply or as technically as you like. We provide access to maintenance schedules and notifications are available, on request, at various levels of technicality.

We focus on existing customers

Happy customers are easier to deal with. Their recommendations of our products and services motivate us and bring us lots of new business. You're our sales team.

When we get too busy, we temporarily stop selling one or more of our services so that we can continue to focus on existing customers.

We listen!

Customers have a say in how we run our business. If there's something your not happy with, or you think something could be done better, don't be shy - tell us. Be blunt and to the point!

Everything we do is revolves around you rather than aspirational 'think-tank' sales targets.

Up-front pricing

You can see all our prices on our website before you buy stuff. There's no bartering so you pay what everyone else pays.

Before we start any bespoke work we'll provide a fixed price quote and we'll immediately flag up any changes you make which would incur additional costs.

We're informal, but professional

We don't invest time in being "prim and proper" - that time is better spent looking after customers.

We are not however, a charity. Our management style is down-to-earth, open and friendly, but we will not tolerate abuse of our good nature. Play fair with us and we'll do everything we can to reward your fairness.

We're financially secure

We've got over 2000 customers in 55 countries. Our business strategy provides a very high level of tolerance to market fluctuations, seasonal trends, industry-specific anomalies and regional trends.

As a rule, we will not allow any single client to constitute more than 10% of our monthly income and should any single client wish to exceed this limit, financial safeguards may be sought to compensate for the risk incurred.

We are permanently busy and don't need to take on work from clients who mess us around, especially those with crazy "All your IPR belongs to us" legal contracts.

We're focussed

Being a privately owned company, we are not obliged to try and create massive short-term returns for investors.

Everything we do has purpose - to solve a specific business problem or fulfil a specific requirement.

We fully test any new products and services before offering them to clients on ourselves. If something doesn't work for us, it doesn't go on sale.

Research and development

Our products and services use a mixture of open source software, third-party commercial software and our own proprietary software.

1. Open source software keeps our prices low, makes our solutions feature-rich and ensures adherence to widely adopted open standards
2. Third-party commercial software provides increased reliability, stability and focus
3. Our proprietary software glues everything together seamlessly to create products and services that are tailored to our clients exact needs

Platform independent

Everything we do is platform independent. As a minimum we test for compatibility with:

1. Operating Systems: Windows, Linux, Apple OS X
2. Web Browsers: Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari, Opera

Our Weaknesses

You don't see this sort of stuff on many websites do you?

Our sales process sucks

Adaptavist became really successful way ahead of schedule. We didn't expect to have a worldwide client base within 12 months of starting the company that would then double every year.

As a result, our sales process is grim and it's a bit of a pain buying stuff from us at times. We're putting a lot of effort in to a new online shop where you can instantly get quotes and buy stuff, but it's probably going to be 2008 before it's ready.

Our support system is a bit techie

We originally used email-based support systems but they just couldn't handle the constant growth of our company. As the amount of emails increased (including spam) so to did the problems associated with emails, including customers with mis-configured email servers who never received our replies and then got irate.

We spent a couple of years trying all kinds of solutions but eventually settled on Atlassian's JIRA issue tracker. It's the only product we've found that enables us to properly manage and track all our communications and tasks in one place.

However, JIRA is a tool designed for techies - it's user interface isn't overly friendly to use and it's not to everyone's taste. We're working on a simpler interface for it but it'll be a while before it becomes really easy to use.

Our speling is pants

It's part of the disease that affects all techies - having spent far too much time with computers, we lack the basic ability to spell. Although spell checkers help, we are often more pre-occupied with making things work reliably, consistently and at an affordable cost than the rather mundane task of spelling words correctly. As the French will tell you, the English language is kept alive and fresh due to it's ability to accommodate new words and phrases, and we're more than happy with their view.

Some of our plugin documentation is out of date

We've been so busy that we're struggling to properly document some of our plugins. If you're someone who likes doing documentation, please get in touch because we could use some extra hands!