Digia is working full steam ahead with Qt Commercial

The following post is written by a guest blogger: Digia Plc. Senior Vice President, Mr. Harri Paani

The transfer of the Qt Commercial licensing business from Nokia to Digia was completed successfully a bit over one month ago. At Digia, we have been hard at work getting everything in place to ensure continuity for Qt commercial customers. We have invested in setting up our R&D team, in order to build new functionality and a verification system. Digia has hundreds of people who have Qt experience and this certainly will help us to ensure that we will provide high quality services for our Qt Commercial customers.

One area of great importance is to make sure that Digia´s development plans are well aligned with our customers’ needs. Based on earlier feedback from Qt Commercial customers we’ve heard, our customers have called for functionality that will support their applications on cross-platform desktop and embedded environments. Our customers have also said that added functionality can’t be included at the cost of stability and reliability. And, they’ve stated that the releases need to be supported longer to ensure business continuity.  Digia listens carefully its customer needs and will develop Qt Commercial according to their feedback.

We will approach our customers with a full customer survey during May. In the meanwhile, I will take this opportunity to present some updates to you right now.

To demonstrate the long term commitment for our customers’ Qt Commercial projects, we are extending the Standard Support from one year to two years after the next major Qt Commercial release is available. With this change a Qt Commercial software product version x.y.z will be supported at least two (2) years following the release date of the following version x.y+1.0 or x+1.y.0, whichever occurs first.

We have also identified that the life-cycle of Qt Commercial major releases should be extended to address the needs of those customers who do not want or cannot upgrade to a newer Qt Commercial version as it becomes available.

To ensure that Qt Commercial runs smoothly with those platforms our customers are actively using, we are complementing the Qt Commercial testing by packaging and testing Qt on several different platform configurations. Those platforms include Windows, Linux, Mac OS, Solaris, AIX, Windows CE and Embedded Linux. Going forward, we want to continue supporting these actively used platforms, as well as to add such new platforms and configurations our customers want to run Qt Commercial on.

Digia’s primary goal is to further develop Qt Commercial on the desktop and embedded platforms.

In order to complement the Standard Support, Priority Support and Premium Support we are working towards providing additional services to our customers, including training, consultancy, application development and UX design services. Together with our partners, we will increase our services offering for the whole Qt ecosystem.

The other major company in Qt is of course Nokia, and we are planning for a more detailed Qt Commercial roadmap aligned with Nokia’s Qt roadmap.  At the same time, we will also continue to support the functionality and platforms that are important for majority of Qt Commercial customers, but are not necessarily included in Nokia’s roadmap in the upcoming major Qt releases. As our customer, you can provide valuable input to all this via the customer survey conducted later this month. And, of course you can contact us at any time using the Customer Portal, the contact from at qt.digia.com, or via your sales representative.

We are working for the benefit of the Qt Commercial customers, as well as the whole Qt ecosystem.

Yours,

Harri Paani, Senior Vice President, Digia Plc.

PS. Digia is promoting Qt Commercial at ESC in Silicon Valley this week. For further info, please see qt.digia.com.