Redvers Cloaking Device - Case Study
Redvers Consulting Ltd
We use our own company as a case study for the Redvers Cloaking Device because we can honestly say that without it, our entire product range could not exist.
As far as we are aware, we are the only company in the world selling COBOL products in source code form. Some companies are giving COBOL source code away under open source licenses and others are selling COBOL in object code form, which, therefore, has to be platform specific. No one else is using a COBOL obfuscator to sell COBOL source code to the entire COBOL customer base regardless of the hardware in use.
Selling products in source code form gives us several advantages over our competitors:
- It makes our products platform independent.
- Compiling our COBOL source code using a customer's compiler will produce a perfectly integrated solution that runs to the same speed, specifications and limitations as the rest of the client application.
- It gives us truly "off-the-shelf" products with no need to visit client sites.
- If a client wishes to migrate to another release of COBOL, "cloaked" source can be migrated and recompiled along with all the other application source code.
- Our products can be easily tailored to suit any site or application by the adjustment of standard COBOL language values.
- It allows the customer to move their COBOL applications to another computer or even computer manufacturer for reasons of outsourcing, backup or company policy.
Probably the most important aspect of selling products in source code form is that we don't need a computer, operating system, compiler etc. for every COBOL platform on the market.
The main players in the computer products market are the giant computer manufacturers who can afford to run every flavour of machine in their range, building and supporting different versions of their products for every platform they invent. Even then, we frequently hear software vendors refusing to support their own older operating systems. With source code products, the product lasts as long as the language does.
In summary, the Redvers Cloaking Device has been our key to efficient marketing of COBOL products like the Redvers COBOL XML Interface, to some of the largest companies in the world, all over the world.