Ladybridge - OpenQM

Company Background

Founded in 1992, Ladybridge Systems are the developers of the OpenQM multivalue database.

Originally, the company provided training, consultancy, support and development services to multivalue sites. Whilst all of these gerneral mutlivalue services are still available, the emphasis has shifted such that OpenQM is now the primary activity of the company. This product grew out of an in-house project to become an important player in the multivalue marketplace.

Ladybridge Systems is a small privately owned company that works within a group of similar small enterprises to make available the resources of a large company without the overheads of maintaining rarely needed specialist skills in-house. This structure allows the company to deliver outstanding services to its clients.

Products and Services

OpenQM is a full functionality multivalue database system at a low cost. Although it is not a clone of any other system, it provides close compatibility with "Information style" multivalue products and has options to select compatibility with "Pick style" systems. OpenQM (more commonly abbreviated to just QM) is gaining a steadily increasing community of users across the world and spanning many industries.

Commercial licences for QM include a extendable upgrade period during which new releases can be installed. There are no mandatory support contracts, support services being provided on a simple hourly charge basis. Clients who prefer pre-paid support can negotiate terms to fit their needs. Every commercial QM licence includes the powerful AccuTerm terminal emulator as a bundled product at no extra cost.

A 30 day evaluation licence can be obtained from the product web site (click here) at no charge. For users who wish to install QM on a PC for non-production purposes such as learning about the product, there is a free Personal Version (click here). Genuine developers with a product to sell into the multivalue marketplace are eligible for a free four user developer licence.

There is also an open source version provided as a "sandbox" for developers who want to experiment with ideas for possible inclusion into the full QM product. The open source version is not considered as suitable for production use as it is totally unsupported and lacks many of the newer features of the product.

Ladybridge Systems continues to provide training and consultancy services to users of other multivalue products.

Websites

The company runs 2 web sites and they are:

• www.ladybridge.com for the training and consultancy services.

• www.openqm.com for the OpenQM product. This site includes downloads of the software and documentation as well as many other resources for QM users.

Key Partnerships

Ladybridge Systems has business relationships with many other companies that supply packages to work with QM. Some of the more important third party products are:

• Nucleus fast track development environment

• Pavuk web development framework

• DesignBais web toolset

• mv.Net native .net interface

• MITS business analysis and reporting tools

Customers

Clients of Ladybridge Systems have included:

• Computer manufacturers and software suppliers

• Major banks in the UK and Europe

• The National Health Service and other healthcare organisations

• Local and national government

• Major retail and mail order companies

• Civil Engineering

• Universities; UK and overseas