You'll have heard these a thousand times: “You only get what you pay for,” “you don’t get anything for nothing” and my personal favourite – “buy cheap, buy twice”. These are all clichés as old as the hills but as true today as ever.
And when you relate this to the application of technology into business processes these words of wisdom, especially “buy cheap, buy twice” go even further, because if you do indeed decide to go cheap, or even worse, free, you could end up paying a lot more than twice.
At Vistair we make no apologies for the fact our solutions aren’t the cheapest on the market, in fact in our industry we see it as a badge of honour. There are plenty of cheap and cheerful – free even – software solutions out there that, to the less enlightened, are an enticing proposition.
But it’s a completely false economy. Sadly by the time you realise that poorly-coded “off the shelf” software you’ve just deployed into your operations isn’t remotely fit for purpose it’s too late and is going to cost a lot more to first extricate and then replace it with something more appropriate.
We plough vast amounts of our resources into R&D, and have a team of super-talented developers working continuously on our airline-specific services, tweaking and refining existing software solutions and coming up with new and innovative products.
And much as they love their work (and trust me, they REALLY love their work!) they don’t do it for free.
As an example, we’ve been working on an iPhone app version of our popular DocuNet manual solution for a while now. We were just about to launch it into the Apple App Store when an update to iOS was announced, meaning we had to put the release back to ensure our app was fully compatible (it is coming though, stay patient my friends!).
That meant more work, more refining and more cost. We can’t wait for the app to finally launch but we also have to balance that investment and try to recoup all of that time and resource that’s been piled into its development.
One of our central philosophies is to continually add value to our airline clients’ businesses, and the way we do this is by delivering outstanding safety, compliance and management solutions that impact where it matters, ultimately adding to their bottom lines.
Commercial airlines all want to use the latest leading edge technology, such as Windows 8, iPads and so forth, but this comes at a price.
So, by all means, go ahead and take that free software trial, or purchase the “cheapest on the market” solution, and bask in all that money you’ve saved.
But long term that perceived saving will come back to bite you, and those old clichés at the top of this post will be proven correct.