DriverMatrix is already installed and serves the support department of a major Japanese printer maker, just in time for the New Year peak time, when all Japanese greet one another for New Year with printed colorful designs. It was a long way to get to this point.

In order to install the beta version which was adapted to this specific OEM, I flew on late September to Japan, and worked together with our reseller there.

It was the first time for me in Japan, and the cultural difference gives the feeling that it is simply a different planet. Working all day in a suit and a tie is something I not used to. Doing that with slippers was definitely a surprise, although a good one.

Understanding the wonders of computerized toilet were amusing, but this probably happens to every Western visiting Japan.

The first install was at the resellers office, and it went smooth, as expected. We were a little more fearful for the second installation at the beta customer site, where issues always pop up. I was prepared to deal with for major issues with heroic efforts, but boringly, everything seemed to pass smoothly, both during installation and during the training. We must have did something really good in a previous life.

To succeed with an Open Source product, we have a policy of “Promise less, Deliver more”, and we stuck to our rules and delivered much more then the agreement promised.

This was possible thanks to the use of well tested open source components which continue to evolve and give sophisticated ways of building wonderful software out of them:

Here I must mention the Django framework which includes an amazing user interface - smart people had already thought of everything - ready to serve whichever application needed. Django web site describes itself as “High-level Python framework that encourages rapid development and clean, pragmatic design”. DriverMatrix interface is based on this framework, and I just can’t agree more.

A minor issue that appeared due to the specific structure of the customers network was taken care of by modifing the virtual machine to use a local squid proxy server. This will probably also be useful in the future with bizarre network setups.

New “last minute” features requests which we got from the customer were implemented during a short 2 weeks cycle from beta to release candidate. The flexible architecture just made it possible also at this critical stage.

An urgent request of smooth upgrade between unsupported version to the release, which was not included in the initial requests was supplied within hours. We are very proud that our fix cycle including QA can be sometimes as short as 48 hours.

The customer was very pleased, and as a way of gratitude, actually delivered the payment one month ahead of time. I be you don’t see much of that with proprietary software beta.

So the bottom line is, Open Source code base proved itself. We also were probably lucky

Of course, Open Source alone is not enough - many thanks are due to our reseller team for translating and bridging the language as well as the cultural difference, making this installation successful, supporting the customer with routine work, and of course giving me good time in Japan.