The company's founder has over thirty years' experience as a manager at a senior level in a major UK public limited company, and his specific expertise was in developing novel solutions based on communications and IT for major UK companies in the finance, retail and utility sectors. As a manager, he undertsood the importance of an efficient administrative office to the smooth running of his company so that sales and engineering teams were able to work effectively to develop customer solutions. As a solution salesman, he saw how technology could transform the operation of a company to give it a competitve edge in its chosen markets and enable it to expand into adjacent markets, building on its core skills.

When he retired, he saw that small companies and individuals with computers used them to automate low level tasks such as word processing and document production. Many of them had accounting and billing systems tailored to their industry, but they did not benefit from the power of computer systems to drive the operation of the business. Many of them also suffered from the sloppy office management which easy availablity of cheap computers encouraged.

He saw that importing the office management techniques which are common (and essential) in big companies and are supported by expensive ERP systems or large IT departments could enable the proprietors to regain control of their chaotic computer systems. In addition, the basics of office management - record keeping, document audit trails, effective filing, document integrity - were largely absent, or if present depended on the experience of someone who had worked as a PA or administrator in a a large company. He saw that imposing the disciplines of office management while freeing the creative members of a company to do what they do best would enable the company to meet the requirements of auditors, quality systems and other administrative overheads often imposed on them by big company customers.

The development of a solution was triggered by the tailoring of a simple letter and invoice management system for a small sole trader who operated in a number of European countries. The software was effectively a training project for Straiton Software's founder whose first job back in the early 70s was to build computer-based message switching systems based on DEC PDP8s with 4k of memory for international banks based in the City. Although he had played around with computers, and became acknowledged as an expert in the use of Microsoft Office, skilled in the development of macros using VBA, he had to learn not only modern software but also modern software development processes.

After initially dabbling in Visual C++, he soon threw his energies into becoming an expert in the newly emerging Microsoft .Net Framework, and the company's software uses both VB.Net and C#. Although a small company, the use of high level modelling techniques based on UML has been imposed from the outset. The company's solutions are targeted at small companies and individuals, but the the focus is to provide tailored solutions which exploit as much as possible of a company's existing document structures and processes. The proposition to prospective customers is to offer them a way to ease the administration of their company and this essentially means imposing some discipline; the aim is to do this while promoting the innovation which is the only way that a small company can develop and prosper.

Straiton Software is based on the experience of the founder as a user of technology, and an understanding of the way technology can help create competitive advantage. It differs from most software companies in that it springs not from technology (which is of course at the heart of what it provides) but from what that technology can do.