May 15, 2013 at 10:18Do you remember how it all started?
Do you remember how it all started?
This post is not accidentally entitled by a quote from Andrei Makarevich’s song: in May, Smart-Soft celebrates its tenth anniversary and today we will talk about the affairs of bygone days. The history of the company is inextricably linked with the penetration into Russia of broadband access to the global network and the Traffic Inspector program, the idea of which was born eleven years ago.
At the end of the nineties of the last century, most subscribers had to use tonal frequency modems operating at speeds up to 56 Kbps on a dial-up telephone line (Dialup-IP) and up to 33.6 Kbps on a dedicated line, which was a copper pair from the office client to the Internet service provider site.
At the beginning of the 2000s, low-speed channels were replaced by broadband access using DSL technologies. There were more exotic options for connecting to the Internet, such as ISDN (dial-up digital connection with service integration), and in addition, ethernet providers (mostly wild and unorganized) and wireless broadband appeared in the country. Traffic was expensive - in some regions the price of a megabyte reached six (or even more) rubles - and it had to be taken into account in detail.
There were no programs allowing Windows to do this - the control problem was solved only using expensive network equipment and / or servers running unix-like OS. The demand for such software for corporate users was (and remains) high.
In 2002, one of the employees of the only provider in Kolomna decided to create his own traffic accounting program and a year later released a test version of the product, later called Traffic Inspector . The new development interested several entrepreneurs and, together with the author of the program, they established the company Smart-Soft on March 17, 2003. Fortunately, the first copy of the Traffic Inspector was sold exactly two months later - on May 17th. This date is considered the birthday of Smart-Soft.
Initially, the company employed only three people. There was no talk of any marketing activity, and they were engaged in programming, as they say, at home (the first products of Apple and Google were made at all in garages - now they call it the buzzword “startup”). Customers themselves distributed information on the forums and sales were solely due to word of mouth.
Over the past ten years, the Traffic Inspector has changed a lot.
A screenshot of the very first version of the program, version 2.0 and the expected 3.0. The difference is visible to the naked eye.
In addition to traffic analysis and reporting tools, they added a contextual firewall, a simple administration console (which even a novice specialist can handle), a VPN server, a proxy server that filters virusesand spam mail gateway, ad blocking options , channel loading controls and much more. In addition, the functions of the gateway are expanded with the help of special modules, and expensive network equipment is not required for its operation.
The evolution of Smart-Soft box products since their appearance in 2006 (previously we sold only electronic keys).
The company has also grown. The number of employees now exceeds forty people (including attracted foreign specialists) and they no longer work in the “garage” - the Smart-Soft office occupies a whole wing of an old two-story mansion. Today we celebrate the anniversary and accept congratulationsClients and technology partners of the company: Kaspersky Lab, Doctor Web, 1C, Softline, CAIR and others. You can also leave your wishes on our website.
This post is not accidentally entitled by a quote from Andrei Makarevich’s song: in May, Smart-Soft celebrates its tenth anniversary and today we will talk about the affairs of bygone days. The history of the company is inextricably linked with the penetration into Russia of broadband access to the global network and the Traffic Inspector program, the idea of which was born eleven years ago.
At the end of the nineties of the last century, most subscribers had to use tonal frequency modems operating at speeds up to 56 Kbps on a dial-up telephone line (Dialup-IP) and up to 33.6 Kbps on a dedicated line, which was a copper pair from the office client to the Internet service provider site.
At the beginning of the 2000s, low-speed channels were replaced by broadband access using DSL technologies. There were more exotic options for connecting to the Internet, such as ISDN (dial-up digital connection with service integration), and in addition, ethernet providers (mostly wild and unorganized) and wireless broadband appeared in the country. Traffic was expensive - in some regions the price of a megabyte reached six (or even more) rubles - and it had to be taken into account in detail.
There were no programs allowing Windows to do this - the control problem was solved only using expensive network equipment and / or servers running unix-like OS. The demand for such software for corporate users was (and remains) high.
In 2002, one of the employees of the only provider in Kolomna decided to create his own traffic accounting program and a year later released a test version of the product, later called Traffic Inspector . The new development interested several entrepreneurs and, together with the author of the program, they established the company Smart-Soft on March 17, 2003. Fortunately, the first copy of the Traffic Inspector was sold exactly two months later - on May 17th. This date is considered the birthday of Smart-Soft.
Initially, the company employed only three people. There was no talk of any marketing activity, and they were engaged in programming, as they say, at home (the first products of Apple and Google were made at all in garages - now they call it the buzzword “startup”). Customers themselves distributed information on the forums and sales were solely due to word of mouth.
Over the past ten years, the Traffic Inspector has changed a lot.
A screenshot of the very first version of the program, version 2.0 and the expected 3.0. The difference is visible to the naked eye.
In addition to traffic analysis and reporting tools, they added a contextual firewall, a simple administration console (which even a novice specialist can handle), a VPN server, a proxy server that filters virusesand spam mail gateway, ad blocking options , channel loading controls and much more. In addition, the functions of the gateway are expanded with the help of special modules, and expensive network equipment is not required for its operation.
The evolution of Smart-Soft box products since their appearance in 2006 (previously we sold only electronic keys).
The company has also grown. The number of employees now exceeds forty people (including attracted foreign specialists) and they no longer work in the “garage” - the Smart-Soft office occupies a whole wing of an old two-story mansion. Today we celebrate the anniversary and accept congratulationsClients and technology partners of the company: Kaspersky Lab, Doctor Web, 1C, Softline, CAIR and others. You can also leave your wishes on our website.