2Paths Team Blog

Any successful company spends its money carefully, seeking best value, much like we spend our own money on household purchases. For a company, software can be a significant investment, similar to our personal investment in building the family home. In both cases, there are several approaches to choose from, each providing similar functions in different ways. 2Paths specializes in delivering commercial web applications, which can be divided into off-the-shelf, configurable, and custom software solutions. These options are similar to the choices between the pre-fabricated, ready-to-build, and architecturally designed approaches to building a residence. In either case, the best solution comes down to the best fit with each customer’s unique needs, whether for commercial software or a new home.

Off the shelf software is a product, intended to be used just as provided. This approach has the benefit of economy of scale, as identical software is provided to many customers. It is a very successful solution for problems that are common to many organizations, and works particularly well for smaller, simpler applications, having a better chance at finding a good fit between many customers and the product. In the housing market, this approach is found in manufactured (mobile) homes and pre-fabricated building kits. While there can be a trade-off in losing personalized features, manufactured houses offer a significant cost saving, and may provide just what a family needs. 2Paths does not hesitate to recommend off-the-shelf software to its customers — and uses such products internally — when there is a good fit between the need and the packaged solution.

Being essentially a set of instructions and stored data, software is naturally configurable: certainly it is more malleable than the wood and stone that is used to build our home, which is configurable mainly in the design stage. With the ready-to-build approach, the homeowner purchases a set of blueprints, then works with the contractor to make adjustments to room sizes, window placement, and other details. 2Paths takes advantage of software configurability in the design phase to select pre-built components — high quality reusable software from the open source community and from our own libraries — which are combined to meet the customer’s basic needs, and which can then be further tweaked to provide an even better fit.

Sometimes there is no pre-existing solution. Often a company has found success with a unique service offering, or has exercised its creativity to find a competitive advantage that requires software in ways that have not yet been used in its industry. Similarly, we may wish to build our home on a steep, rocky or irregular lot on which a standard suburban home cannot be placed. In these situations, the customer and the designer work closely together to find a solution. 2Paths has significant experience creating unique custom software solutions, expressly tailored to its customer’s needs, just as our architect works to design a house that perfectly fits our family needs and building site.

Because software is so malleable, many applications consist of combinations of these three approaches. 2Paths happily uses packaged software and pre-built components when these contribute the best value to the solution, and will recommend a custom approach when cost of packaged software, with an excess of unneeded features would cost the customer more. 2Paths has a particular strength in developing custom solutions, but the company’s pride comes from finding the unique best fit with a customer’s needs: off the shelf software, configurable components, custom designs, or a combination of these: are all potentially viable options for a web application.

With some focused pressure from Boris Mann, and a little from Kris Krug, we now have a blog. The point is two-fold. First we want to show people a little more about us - people that may be interested in working here and clients that are thinking of working with us. Secondly it provides the people working at 2Paths a place to send information to each other instead of via email.

Without further ado, we begin!