A vision several years in the making and years in development came to fruition today. Toro is here today due the founder's frustration with the way that enterprise software applications have traditionally been sold, customized, deployed and managed. It seems to us that the enterprise software sales and development model has not changed significantly in the past few decades.
Software as a Service (SaaS) is slowly changing the traditional models but even then many of the enterprise class SaaS vendors still have a "contact us for pricing" notice on their web site and on-premise deployments still account for a significant percentage of enterprise software sales. Toro was born to address this problem and provide transparency to the enterprise software market regardless of the deployment model. It is our mission to make enterprise software accessible by creating applications that are dramatically easier to assess, use, customize and manage.
In our opinion the enterprise software industry lacks transparency. That is, transparency as to the cost, deliverable, timeframe to deploy, and management of enterprise software. Enterprise software companies do not typically publish their price lists preferring instead to have an enterprise sales consultant call a sales lead, discover a budget and then charge what they think the client can afford. Most projects go significantly over budget, run behind time, or are not finished at all. Then, when it comes time to upgrade an on-premise system you have to dump, replace and start the whole process over again.
But seriously, how many times does the same function or integration have to be rewritten? Why can't there be more reuse of code or betterr yet a marketplace to share, Download or even sell scripts, apps and commonly used components?
Deploying enterprise software has suffered from the same lack of transparency. Typically enterprise software is sold as a "framework" which is highly customizable. However, this has lead to a model where there is little reuse of code or sharing. Each client will typically pay for the same function or integration that has been written time and time again. Presentation, business rules and workflows should and must be customizable. That together with interoperability and scalability is what defines enterprise requirements. But seriously, how many times does the same function or integration have to be rewritten? Why can't there be more reuse of code or better yet a marketplace to share, download or even sell scripts, apps and commonly used components?