Smallworld develops software products that solve specific problems for our customers. In developing these application products, we work actively to understand the common needs of customers and then deliver innovative solutions to those problems. This is the same customer-centric approach that worked effectively for Smallworld in its formative years—although the scale and depth of these application products have grown markedly.

We expect that the Smallworld product basket will eventually encompass a wide range of application products that automate processes for designing physical facilities, managing operations, analyzing networks, improving responses to outages, analyzing market opportunities and addressing a host of other business needs. The application products we develop will be driven largely by what our customers tell us they need.

In offering these applications, we will capitalize on the buy-don’t-build trend in software. Our customers don’t want to be in the software development and maintenance business. They have recognized the higher costs and longer time frames associated with creating proprietary software solutions. Instead, they want to buy proven products that are quickly and easily deployed, that integrate seamlessly with existing data, and that interoperate easily with existing systems.

Smallworld meets all of these requirements.

All of our application products will draw upon our core software for modeling spatially connected networks. In fact, we’ve been working very deliberately to make our core software even better suited to the development of application products that interoperate with other systems. Smallworld 3, the new version of our core product, is tailored to enterprise-wide solutions development. It includes many features that will make for easy integration with products from other vendors, such as Oracle and SAP. Indeed, Smallworld 3 itself is now fully compatible with the Oracle8 data management environment.