In late January, 2008 Jamar Technologies sold PC-Travel and the supporting programs to us here at Ridge Engineering, Inc.. Ridge is the Florida based consulting company that developed PC-Travel for Jamar in 2001 and has been doing most of the support for the software ever since. You may have talked to Don or Jody at one time or another and didn’t realize we did not actually work for Jamar.

This deal was made because Jamar decided they did not want to use outside contractors for software development; they have their own in-house programmers now. However, they also didn’t want to try to duplicate all of the knowledge that Ridge has developed over the years, and the tech support people did not really want to learn all of the subtle aspects of the software. At the same time we have been making extensive upgrades to the software to take the software from version 1 to version 2. This would require more software development by Jamar and more learning by the sales and support people.

The answer was fairly simple. Ridge bought the rights to PC-Travel and will develop, market, sell, and support it. This will guarantee that the software will be developed in a speedy manner and that the support for existing customers will continue without interruption.

What does this mean for you, the existing or potential user? Not much really. You still will interact with us here at Ridge. We will continue to support the existing users of the software just like before; even the phone number is still the same. The main difference is that you won’t contact Jamar directly for anything. Before, all sales related issues would go to Jamar and all technical questions would come to us. Now all of the contacts will be with us.

There is an immediate benefit for the potential user. One of the first things we did was lower the price of the software. With Jamar there were separate prices for the office software and the various field based software. We are combining all of the software into one suite and selling the entire suite for an introductory price of $995, which is less than the old price of PC-Travel alone. You will get PC-Travel, GPS2LT, GPS2PDA, OBD2LT, OBD2PDA, and PC-LOS (software to evaluate intersection Level of Service, which has been in extended beta for the last year) all for one price. We also simplified the licensing agreement; now it is a site license with no ‘seats’ meaning you can install the software on as many desktops, laptops, PDAs as you wish (as long as all of the computers are part of the same office or site.

We have aggressive plans for the software in 2008 and beyond. Version 2 is now available but there will be continual improvements to the software for the next year or more.

Give us a call and we’ll gladly explain this transition in greater detail.