August 2024 - A 3rd party failure brings a new opportunity
Following a challenging few days, our Managing Director David has announced a difficult and complex change - breaking a dependency on 3rd party software and laying the foundation for a better future
For over 15 years CodeStep UK (previously TheCodeStep.co.uk) has used software from an American company to help us deliver our production process and software factory. It had it's limitations and substantial costs, but it was worth it - because it allowed us to deliver a stable and long life product to our clients
Over the years we have had a few bumps in the road, with the 3rd party providers' services failing, compatibility issues and in some cases the service just couldn't do what we needed. But their support team was first class, and they always fixed the problem
But the last few days proved we had to change our direction. The company we used has failed us. Their software licence has been broken by a Windows Update and whilst these things do happen - their support service has been unacceptable for a large organisation and entirely unprofessional. We have been left with broken licences that they refuse to fix despite us paying in full for their products
Hours and days have been wasted with the support team making excuses, refusing to take responsibility and even suggesting we have to buy something else because they have changed their minds on what their software can do - ultimately leaving us without a long term solution and causing serious disruption. Their service level is unacceptable and the threat they pose to our clients cannot be allowed to continue
We will not allow our customers to be hijacked or held back by any of our suppliers
Executing our Contingency Plan to protect our customers
So on the 15th August - CodeStep UK are announcing a complete change of how we publish software. And this time, we won't be relying on anyone else either, we are building our own publishing software to integrate seamlessly into our production process - built entirely in-house by our own experts and fully supported to ensure our development teams are never held hostage again
Over the next week we will build and commission our new service and transition everything we do to it and we can't be more excited about the possibilities!
This isn't just a last minute change. For two years we have been planning on streamlining and de-risking our supply chain to give us more flexibility and improve our scope to grow, so we were well prepared for this scenario. We just didn't expect to complete it so quickly!.
But, this development will allow us to scale like never before without the costs and technical limitations associated with the previous provider and allow us to further reduce the costs and expanding the options available
The new DreamServer Studio 5.4 brings forward our future planned changes - and is now entirely self sufficient, scalable to unlimited users and will never again cost us licences for every developer or every server at thousands of dollars a time, dramatically reducing the TCO for both developers and end customers
UPDATE, 18th August: Developers are instructed to remove DSX Studio 5.3 and ALL 3rd party CST publishing software WITH IMMEDIATE EFFECT. DSX Studio 5.4 is now available for install. See Incident Reference: 2024081610000017 for more information
DSX Studio 5.4 is now pure .NET, with no 3rd Party Dependencies. CST Batch Processing relying on 3rd party software is no longer approved for use by any developer or contractor servicing CodeStep clients and must be replaced with the .Net Compiler pack provided by CodeStep Support