Why build all of this.

Every year more of what a business depends on moved into a subscription that could be repriced, changed or withdrawn, on infrastructure nobody local could see. For most companies that trade is fine. For some — a firm with regulatory obligations, a client on a bad line, an operation that cannot stop when a distant service has an outage — it is not.

There was no complete alternative to point those customers at. There were parts: a mail server here, a file sync tool there, each with its own login and none of them aware of the others. So we built the set, and made them share one identity, one permission model and one control panel.

It has to run in both places

Every product installs on a server in your building and on our infrastructure, from the same build. Nothing is withheld from the on-premises version to make the hosted one more attractive. That constraint has cost us features; it is also the entire point.

No copyleft in the stack

Software licensed under the AGPL or GPL cannot be shipped inside a product a customer installs and owns without conditions most businesses will not accept. So every component was chosen — and in several cases written from scratch — to avoid it. IronIngot exists largely because the document editor we were paying for charged per user.

Say where things actually are

Nine products do not arrive finished at the same moment. Rather than hide the ones that are early, every product page on this site carries a status and the reason for it. One of them currently opens an empty window, and says so. We would rather lose an enquiry than win one that unravels in the first demonstration.

The infrastructure is in South Africa, operated by the same people who answer the phone. IronForge — the hosting arm — carries the rest of the suite, which means we find out about a problem the same way you would, at the same time.

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