Fifteen years ago, your cousin, who was just graduating from a junior college with a degree in computers, wrote some custom software for your business.  It only took him 8 months to write, and you’ve been using it ever since.  A couple years later you wanted him to update it, but it turns out he decided software development wasn’t for him. He moved to Thailand to pursue his male modeling career. He’s been there ever since, and you’re stuck with his old software.

In the meantime, your business has grown.  And you’re still using that software.  All your employees hate it.  You hate it.  It only runs on Windows 95 and a Novell Network. All you know is that he developed it in Access.  Or VB6.  Either way, you don’t know what to do about it.  But in order to support that software, you haven’t upgraded your computers since 2001 and you’re still using coaxial cabling.  It takes 15 minutes for your computers to boot, and you’re not even sure if your data is being backed up.

You just got a couple of big contracts.

So what are you going to do about your old software?

You MUST update your old software.  The new contracts require you to track data you just can’t track.  You’ve searched the internet and can’t find anything that does what you need, because your requirements are quite unique.  You have taken a vow to never use Excel or Access for anything other than simple projects because you’ve been down that rabbit hole before.

You’re fresh out of cousins.  You asked your employees, and none of them have any cousins who do software development either.  Except for Jim, but you’ve met his cousin and know you can’t go there.

After some digging, you find a folder called “Source Code” on your Novell NetWare 486 server.  You opened a file in Notepad and it’s gibberish.  Your employees are threatening to riot.

You do a quick Google search for “custom software development,” and you find a listing for Ravine Software.  You like our cool website, so you decide to give us a call and see if we can help with your old software.

We can help!

Ravine Software has been dealing with businesses in your situation for years.  You’d be surprised how often companies are relying on old software that is outdated and ineffective, and they either can’t get the code updated, or can’t find anything to replace it. In the meantime, their productivity suffers.  Their employees are disgruntled, and their business runs inefficiently.

Sometimes you have the source code, and sometimes you don’t.  We’ve worked on projects where the client printed out thousands of pages of source code and handed it to us.  We’ve worked on projects where the source code was readily available.  And we’ve worked on projects where there was NO source code available, whatsoever.  We were able to successfully help ALL of those customers.

When you have existing custom software, you have some advantages.  You have a roadmap of what you need, right there.  Your power users can tell us exactly how you use the software.  They can tell us what works, what doesn’t work, and what it SHOULD do but doesn’t.  Whether you have your source code or not, we have something tangible to guide us.

If you DO have the source code for your old software, there are several options.  We could simply make changes to your existing codebase, recompile, and re-deploy it for you.  Many times, however, the existing system is just too outdated.  If that’s the case, we can take the code, extract the logic and flow, and use that to build the NEW solution.  You’d be surprised how much money you’ll save because we have that code to work from.  If you do NOT have the source code, we can simply use the old system as a detailed map to create a new one.

Somebody help me, please!

If you have old software you need to update, please make your employees happy and contact us!  We will assess your situation and make a recommendation that fits your needs AND your budget.  We’ve probably seen it before and we can help you more quickly than you might expect.  We’ll sit down and talk to you and your employees.  Even if you don’t have the source code, we can work with your power users to document exactly what your software does and come up with a plan to move forward.

We’re here to help.  Allow us to ease your pain!