Here are some of the things we don't want to do:
- Harass you with infomercials you aren't interested in or ask you to send us your weekly allowance in a brown paper bag
- Change Vaadin's focus from free and liberal to anything else
- Write random blogposts without any real content (joke!)
Knowing this, the most typical question we hear from you is: How does “Vaadin - the company” make its money to finance its R&D?
First of all, Vaadin today consists of some 60 coders, hackers, wizards, code monkeys, certified paladins and ninjas (I am definitely in the last group!) doing everything from product development to hands-on projects for you, our customers. Our team consists of designers, architects, client-side widget specialists and enterprise application experts.
The projects we've worked on range from aeronautic to insurance and banking, from meat production to shipyards and all the way to space exploration and gambling (but not the combination, although it sounds intriguing!). Being in business with different kinds of companies from Melbourne to Boston and Vienna to outer space has exposed us to so many different projects and architectures that we're safe to say we've seen the most... But we still necessarily haven't heard from you - and I'm glad to be proven wrong and learn more about what you're doing.
We make our money by helping you leverage the powers hidden inside Vaadin (yes, we’d like to think of ourselves as He-men living inside Castle Grayskull helping the good people of the world). We believe in freedom, the freedom of choice and no hooks. We don't believe in locking you in, but adding even more on top of Vaadin and it works as our showcase to you that we know what we're talking about. Vaadin is an amazing technology and we keep investing more and more in it. However, really kickstarting your development team with it is best done with the help of the guys who have built the framework from the ground up. And we're confident we're able to do this faster with our experience from hundreds of projects. Be it one-week onsite trainings and kickstart projects, having an expert-in-team together with your experts at your place or ours (Germany, US, Finland) or even delivering a turnkey solution for you - we're very happy to help you.
So that's our little secret of how we fund our product development, research and everything else we do for you in the community, and now you know the secret that only a few selected people out here know (psst, don't spread it too much)... but yes, we have been helping our customers with Vaadin projects for the past 12 years already.
With Seasonal Greetings,
Fredrik
VP of Sales
fredrik@vaadin.com