Formever’s CTO, Lance Gutteridge, had decades of experience in building software systems for businesses.  In all that time he had a growing feeling that companies were being poorly served by the software they were using.  Out-of-the-box ERP systems were often ill-suited to the individual company’s needs. 

Too often companies were forced to change the way they did things to conform to the way the software worked – the exact opposite of how things should be.  Worker’s were disrespected by having their time wasted, and by being blamed for flaws in how the system functioned, when really it was the fault of poor design.  Implementations generally ran way over budget and way over time.  Pricing has long been predatory in the software industry, with exorbitant seat licenses and fees, regardless of whether they were truly returning value.

Lance had a vision that things could be done differently – taking advantage of improvements in hardware, and using a totally different philosophical approach – one that approaches each company as a unique set of procedures and practices, requiring its own custom build.  It seems a simple concept on its face – make software that matches the needs of each individual company, software that is lean and efficient, having only what that company needs, with no unnecessary bloat.  He realized, however, that it wouldn’t be enough to just write some articles complaining about industry practices. As Linus Torvalds said, “Talk is cheap.  Show me the code!”  We needed to make a functioning tool, so that if anyone tried to say it couldn’t be done, we would have at least one working example to refute them.

Around the same time, an old client approached him, needing an update from an old legacy system.  It was the perfect opportunity to put the theory into practice, and the first implementation of Formever was born.  Now, many years and many iterations later, we’re putting out Release 12, a greatly improved no-code tool that allows software designers worldwide to make better software for their clients.