Griffon Solutions is less than 3 years old, having started on a part-time basis in Quebec in late 2006. It is privately held by myself and my co-founder, Marie-Claude Queenton. We provide web solutions to small businesses in Canada and the United States. You can find our website at http://www.griffonsolutions.com. In the first year and a half of the company we have focused on the development of a custom C# web application integration framework.

We are currently developing a C# multilingual web application integration framework which we intend to release as open source in Q1 2009. This framework has been in limited production use for the last few years  and hence has evolved in response to real world client requests.

Using this, we are in the process of building a web-hosted business productivity platform for our customers to use on a subscription basis. This platform will allow them to easily manage their client information, communicate via mechanisms such as email blasts, SMS messages, blogs, and newsletters, use workflow for business process management, and integrate with Web 2.0 systems such as Flickr, Delicious, and Facebook to expose their company brand to as many prospective customers as possible.

The productivity platform will be paid for by a monthly subscription model for all client companies (the public browses for free).

To make ends meet and provide real world client feedback we are also currently providing SharePoint consulting on a limited basis.

We make heavy use of cutting edge Microsoft technology. Everything is built on a unified stack of .NET 3.5 technology. Our code integrates with enterprise technology such as SharePoint. This helps to reduce time to market, and maximizes reliability, security, and scalability.

The small size of the company and use of Agile development practices results in aggressive development schedules which larger companies would have difficulty matching. Additionally, we keep very close to the end user small business clients which means our product evolves based on first-hand requirement gathering.

We are also leveraging over a decade of international web development best practices and experience!

Nick Kellett's profile:

Full profile on LinkedIn at http://www.linkedin.com/in/nicholaskellett.

The Web Application Integration framework is defensible by virtue of its intended licensing model - open source with a dual-license to allow proprietary use. Since the code is freely available this will hopefully encourage open source contribution, resulting in rapid improvements to the framework. By being the uber-licensor and carefully vetting code contributions we keep code ownership clean. 

IP is also defended by rapid development cycles which mean we focus on innovation and meeting client demands.