"The pressure from the legacy users, forced our development team to listen!", said Sachin Purohit, the Head of Business Development. "There aren't many solutions like SafeSquid, and most of them are either very expensive or simply lack the granular controls. Windows based versions of SafeSquid prior to the new version 3.1.2, were suited only for Windows 2000 based systems, and we drew a lot of flak from our users who wanted to continue using SafeSquid on more recent platforms like Vista, Windows Home Server, Windows 7, etc. The users initially ganged up on the forum based Customer support center, and then started to send us really hard-hitting emails."
Manish Kochar, who channelizes all the research into product developmemt, explained, "we are basically a Linux based development team, so all the technology related activities are really Linux-centric. SafeSquid was originally built for Linux, and a majority of our customers have a SafeSquid based web-gateway set up on Linux. So even though SafeSquid's core is entirely our own, and is extremely portable, the process of software testing on Windows was really the most difficult part for us. Besides there are quite a few things that work on Linux, and we take them for granted, whereas they are alien like concepts on Windows."
Addressing the fellow resellers Manish Sanghrajka, of Comprompt Solutions, interjected, "I really don't care about the platform and other such difficulties. Our customers expect us to deliver useable solutions, within a reasonable cost. SafeSquid for Linux, was earlier free for 20 users. But that still required the primarily windows-based networks, of my SME customers, to invest in maintaining Linux in addition to Windows. Besides you really can not expect the small businesses that have about 10-15 windows based computers to invest in another Linux based system! So SafeSquid on Windows was frankly an obvious conclusion. Compatibility resolution will simply increase the penetration depth, and popularity. For less than 400 USD, I can now transform the network of an average sized business enterprise, such that Internet borne viruses are stopped at gateway level, individual user-level access and web-site policies, pornographic content can be reliably blocked, usage reports with full analysis are served. And the enterprise owners love that because it would be a purely server side implementation that requires no additional installation or change on the client desktops. Besides SafeSquid's perpetual server based licensing system is a deal-clincher, because most of the other solutions simply cease to work if the subscription is not renewed in time"
"SafeSquid 3.1.2 is surely an important mile-stone, but the best is yet to come. We are still working on some areas. The content caching system in Windows isn't as fast on Linux, on Windows we offer only an ADS / LDAP based authentication, we still are few steps away from NTLM based SSO." Kochar continued, "but yes the devel team is working really hard, and should produce some really reliable solutions. We expect to release another five to six upgrades, as and when the guys in the SafeSquid Labs, produce something useful."
http://www.safesquid.com/
