Who We Are

You might have already noticed that we're a little different. 

We believe the fundamental question we pose to potential customers - "Does your software help your business grow?" - is almost an afterthought to much of the software industry today.

Somewhere along the line, commercial software - which was once the realm of brilliant designers, engineers, and artisans - started to get too comfortable. Vendors lost touch with what their customers really wanted, and ran up on the rocks with costs and business models that were out of sync with the reality of the market they lived in.

As categories of software that were once exotic became near-commodities, customers increasingly questioned why it cost so much, and why both the products and the vendors were so hard to work with. Mainstays of the industry disappeared almost overnight, and enterprise software customers had the uncomfortable realization that there was no longer any safety in working with large, established players.

This was the emerging scene for enterprise customers. For the small to midsized business, it wasn't any better. There were perfectly adequate starter solutions, the kind of accounting software you could buy off the shelf at your local computer store, but to step up to a real enterprise system was prohibitive - both in cost and complexity. The big products were designed with big companies in mind, with tools and technologies that were generations old, and extremely difficult to modify or scale down.

The Rise of Open Source

While this was going on at the application level, there was something else interesting afoot at the infrastructure level of information technology. Little-noticed by the big incumbent vendors, a phenomenon known as open source software was starting to come into its own. The practice of programmers around the world, collaboratively developing software over the Internet, seemed to many a hobby without any real business application.

But the open source community, which numbered in the tens of thousands, worked tirelessly to improve the core operating systems, databases, and servers that powered much of the Internet. These building block software components quickly caught up with, and in many cases surpassed, their counterparts in the world of proprietary software.

New features were added faster, and quality-tested by thousands of real-world users. Bugs were identified and fixed more quickly, and with an openness and candor that even the most traditional IT managers found refreshing. Security improved dramatically, as vulnerabilities that had previously been locked up in proprietary compiled code were exposed to the antiseptic sunlight of open source development. In one well-publicized case, a major database software vendor actually had an embarrassing "back door" security hole fixed by an independent developer within days of releasing its product as open source -- and this software had been powering customers in the military, banking, and other sensitive industries for years!

The founders of the company that would become xTuple saw a compelling opportunity to build a new solution for small manufacturers -- based on open standards which would give growing companies the flexibility they needed. On the technological side, that meant leveraging all the work on robust open source building blocks such as the Linux operating system, the PostgreSQL database, and the Qt framework for C++.

But the desire for open standards also extended to the business logic of the software. Manufacturing concepts such as MRP and MRP-II had been around for years, and had been rigorously codified by organizations such as APICS. But a surprising number of programs -- even the more expensive ones -- went their own way, forcing users to change their business processes to accommodate the software. That struck us as fundamentally backwards -- the software should be open, based on standard professional methodologies, but with the flexibility to accommodate the individual characteristics of particular vertical manufacturing industries. What would you call such a thing? Open Manufacturing.

So we started writing code. Lots of it. And we started a company.