Software venture promises awesome results

By ADAM GIFFORD

One of New Zealand's most successful software exports, Bulletproof FTP, has thrown its weight behind a new venture to sell "awesome" software utilities over the web.

Awesome Utilities, a Gen-i subsidiary and the brainchild of Gen-i enterprise networks manager David Spratt, was conceived to market Failover! a utility developed within Gen-i that allows network administrators to better manage user profiles and home directories.

Failover! redirects users to another server in an NT or Citrix environment.

Mr Spratt said he believed there was an opening for a site which sorted the wheat from the chaff and that Awesome utilities were simple, easy-to-use products that would make techos say 'I wish I had thought of this.'

He said such software needed to be cheap at no more than $US100 ($225), which is the cost of Failover!, which does a similar job to packages costing more than $1000. Selected freeware or shareware will also be included on the site.

The potential of the new site can be judged from the success of Bulletproof FTP, a file transfer protocol client software product created by Parnell software developer Andrew Connell. It is used to maintain web sites through the transfer of files to web servers and the sharing of files between internet users.

According to the Bulletproof FTB site, there have been more than 1.7 million downloads of the utility since June 1999.

Bulletproof Software marketing manager Thomas Scovell said the company would not say how many of those downloads were for the $US29.95 full version, rather than the 30-day free trial, but "it's six figures."

That makes it in the top three FTP utilities, along with CuteFTP and WSFTP.

Mr Scovell said the free Gozilla product was probably the most widely used FTP utility on the Windows platform, but Bulletproof FTP was targeted at webmasters because of its superior uploading ability.

Its features included automatically reconnecting and resuming from where it left off if the connection was lost, the scheduling and automating of processes, and a remote mirroring capability, so that new files were automatically downloaded.

It was originally developed as freeware, but evolved into a paid-for product to fund its support and further development.

Most copies were sold overseas, with marketing being done through review sites, where the software consistently scored five stars.

Mr Scovell said Bulletproof Software considers the Awesome Utilities site a good way to handle commodity sales of its software.

He said that approach would free the company to pursue more customisation and OEM (original equipment manufacturer) projects for large clients.

Links:

www.awesomeutilities.com

Bullet Proof ftp