Do you remember how it all started?
Do you remember how it all started?
This post is not accidentally entitled a quote from a song by Andrei Makarevich: in May Smart-Soft celebrates its tenth anniversary and today we will talk about the affairs of bygone days. The company's history is inextricably linked with the penetration of broadband access to the global network to Russia and the Traffic Inspector program, the idea of ​​which was born eleven years ago.
In the late nineties of the last century, most subscribers had to use tone-frequency modems that worked at speeds up to 56 Kbps on a dial-up telephone line (Dialup-IP) and up to 33.6 Kbps on a dedicated line that was a copper pair from the office client to an ISP site.
At the beginning of the two thousandth years, low-speed channels were replaced by broadband access using DSL technology. There were also more exotic options for connecting to the Internet, such as ISDN (switched digital connection with the integration of services), and in addition, ethernet-providers (mostly wild and unorganized) and wireless broadband access appeared in the country. The traffic was expensive - in some regions the price of a megabyte reached six (or even more) rubles - and it had to be considered in detail.
There were no programs allowing to do this for Windows then - the problem of control was solved only with the use of expensive network equipment and / or servers running under unix-like OS. The need for such software from corporate users was (and remains) high.
In 2002, one of the employees of the only provider in Kolomna decided to create their own traffic metering program and a year later released a test version of the product, called Traffic Inspector later. A new development has interested several entrepreneurs and, together with the author of the program, they founded the company Smart-Soft on March 17, 2003. By a happy coincidence, the first copy of Traffic Inspector was sold exactly two months later - on May 17th. This date is considered the birthday of Smart Software.
Initially, the company employed only three people. There was no talk of any marketing activity, but they were engaged in programming, as they say, at home (the first products from Apple and Google were made in garages at all - now they call it the buzzword “startup”). Customers themselves spread the information on the forums and sales were exclusively due to word of mouth.
For ten years, Traffic Inspector has changed a lot.
Screenshot of the very first version of the program, version 2.0 and expected 3.0. The difference is visible to the naked eye.
In addition to the traffic analysis and reporting tools, a context-sensitive firewall was added to it, a simple administration console (which even a novice specialist can handle), a VPN server, a proxy server, a spam- filtering viruses and spam, ad blocking options , channel loading controls and much another. In addition, the gateway functions are expanded with the help of special modules, and its work does not require expensive network equipment.
The evolution of Smart-Soft boxed products since their introduction in 2006 (previously we only sold 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 congratulations from customers and technology partners of the company: Kaspersky Lab, Doctor Web, 1C, Softline, TSAIR and others. You can also leave your wishes on our website.
This post is not accidentally entitled a quote from a song by Andrei Makarevich: in May Smart-Soft celebrates its tenth anniversary and today we will talk about the affairs of bygone days. The company's history is inextricably linked with the penetration of broadband access to the global network to Russia and the Traffic Inspector program, the idea of ​​which was born eleven years ago.
In the late nineties of the last century, most subscribers had to use tone-frequency modems that worked at speeds up to 56 Kbps on a dial-up telephone line (Dialup-IP) and up to 33.6 Kbps on a dedicated line that was a copper pair from the office client to an ISP site.
At the beginning of the two thousandth years, low-speed channels were replaced by broadband access using DSL technology. There were also more exotic options for connecting to the Internet, such as ISDN (switched digital connection with the integration of services), and in addition, ethernet-providers (mostly wild and unorganized) and wireless broadband access appeared in the country. The traffic was expensive - in some regions the price of a megabyte reached six (or even more) rubles - and it had to be considered in detail.
There were no programs allowing to do this for Windows then - the problem of control was solved only with the use of expensive network equipment and / or servers running under unix-like OS. The need for such software from corporate users was (and remains) high.
In 2002, one of the employees of the only provider in Kolomna decided to create their own traffic metering program and a year later released a test version of the product, called Traffic Inspector later. A new development has interested several entrepreneurs and, together with the author of the program, they founded the company Smart-Soft on March 17, 2003. By a happy coincidence, the first copy of Traffic Inspector was sold exactly two months later - on May 17th. This date is considered the birthday of Smart Software.
Initially, the company employed only three people. There was no talk of any marketing activity, but they were engaged in programming, as they say, at home (the first products from Apple and Google were made in garages at all - now they call it the buzzword “startup”). Customers themselves spread the information on the forums and sales were exclusively due to word of mouth.
For ten years, Traffic Inspector has changed a lot.
Screenshot of the very first version of the program, version 2.0 and expected 3.0. The difference is visible to the naked eye.
In addition to the traffic analysis and reporting tools, a context-sensitive firewall was added to it, a simple administration console (which even a novice specialist can handle), a VPN server, a proxy server, a spam- filtering viruses and spam, ad blocking options , channel loading controls and much another. In addition, the gateway functions are expanded with the help of special modules, and its work does not require expensive network equipment.
The evolution of Smart-Soft boxed products since their introduction in 2006 (previously we only sold 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 congratulations from customers and technology partners of the company: Kaspersky Lab, Doctor Web, 1C, Softline, TSAIR and others. You can also leave your wishes on our website.
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Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/179747/
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