For Frozen Mountain Software, the company didn’t set out to become the industry leader in creating powerful commercial software libraries for real-time applications. Rather, its founders were focused on building real-time communications applications that would compete with Visio on an online web browser.
“We totally got sidetracked,” Frozen Mountain Software President Anton Venema told Webrtcworld at the WebRTC Conference & Expo, taking place from June 17-19 in Atlanta, Georgia. “We got so involved in building the collaboration piece that it took over and took on a life of its own. We found people were more interested in buying that component to enable real-time communications in their application and that’s how our first product came about.”
The company made its first splash in 2008 with the introduction of WebSync, which provides both server implementation, which handles processing of the incoming requests, and a variety of client libraries for various platforms, which are used to send and receive data through the server component. WebSync is all about real-time synchronization between two browsers, and allows developers to push live data to a web browser or any other compatible client without requiring any plugins, security changes, or dedicated servers.
After enjoying success with WebSync, the company wanted to explore the creation of a peer-to-peer browser and, as such, IceLink—a collection of libraries that enable you to create reliable UDP media streams between peers, regardless of the peer's network configuration and environment—was born.
“Our goal is to make it easy for developers to build real-time applications because real-time software is hard,” Venema said. “We try to make it as simple as possible, and that’s our fundamental goal. We don’t sell applications to end users but we want to make it easy for them to build applications.”
Since its inception, Frozen Mountain Software has enjoyed “slow and steady” growth, explained Venema. Getting both WebSync and IceLink out the door was critical for the company and its flagship offerings have enabled the company to enter into a lot of consulting work. In fact, what starts out as a single license sell often turns into a product devolvement branch.
For Frozen Mountain Software, the company is especially excited by its introduction of IceLink and the concept surrounding peer-to-peer.
“Peer-to-peer stuff is awesome,” said Venema. “It’s a really cool way to build an application and a different way to think about an application. It’s inexpensive for companies to deploy, less server resources are needed and the decentralization leads to confidence in the end user. The can rest assured that what they are sending out over the Internet isn’t going through some central server and being recorded where it can be hacked into later. There’s empowerment for the end user.”
With two core offerings under its belt—including its third offering TheRest, a collection of libraries that allow you to build simple, flexible REST services quickly and easily—Frozen Mountain Software is focused on continued innovation and envelope pushing. This week at WebRTC Conference & Expo, for example, the company is focused on networking with other companies, identifying potential partnerships and pinpointing other companies and solutions it can complement.
Following this week’s conference, Frozen Mountain Software will focus on including support for the Windows Phone product and offering reliable data channel support.
“We want to be known for developer support,” Venema said. “If you are developer and need support or you need developers we are the people to talk to.”
Edited by
Maurice Nagle
