Ethics are essential, respect is paramount. Technology moves quickly, but we think that makes it all the more important to have principles that don’t.
We have developed a code of ethics that influences every decision we make in everything we do – from our product design and documentation to our pricing strategies and our marketing. Everything counts.
Here are some examples of ways we are respectful to our employees, customers & partners:
No website cookies
Did you notice that our website doesn’t have a cookie statement? That’s because we have no website cookies. What – none?! Indeed, zero, zilch, nada. While cookies like Google Analytics and social media pixels can provide a limited amount of useful information to help companies improve websites and target advertising, they’re hardly essential. Can we justify a small marginal benefit at the cost of violating our visitors privacy? No, no chance. We use a clever little service called Plausible.io that allows us to see basic web traffic data without capturing any of visitors personal data whatsoever. If you’re privacy conscientious like us and want to go pixel & cookie-free on your website, we recommend you to take a look at Plausible or other alternatives.
No creepy tracker ads
This should be obvious because of our stance on cookies. But just to be clear: we do no creepy tracker-based or privacy-invading advertising at all in any shape or form. We try to spend as little money on advertising as possible. Normally we grow fast enough with word-of-mouth alone, but occasionally when we’ve got an exciting new announcement we do use some limited online advertising. This includes banners on a few topical websites and on rare occasion some search engine advertising. But we don’t do any social media advertising and we don’t do any ‘retargeting advertising’. This is this type of cookie/pixel based advertising where you’ve visited a website and then you suddenly see their adverts popping up everywhere you look, from Instagram and Facebook to other random websites and blogs. It probably works pretty well, but we find it creepy, annoying and invasive, so we don’t do it.
No product lock-in
One of the worst things about a lot of big cloud software providers – we’re looking at you Microsoft, Google, Salesforce, Oracle, SAP (and a big list of others) – is how they try to make their products ‘sticky’. Their products get more and more complex – and as they do any hope of ever migrating away from them dwindles even as their value and benefits diminish. The Matrix has you. We have gone the other way. We think that tech lock-in sucks. It’s anti-competitive and ultimately takes power away from customers like you, and hands the power back to the tech companies. We think this is wrong. We design our products to be easy to implement and easy to remove. If you only need one of our products for a year, then take it for a year, enjoy it and then move on. We’ll even help you move away if you want.
No greedy price inflation
IAM Cloud has been around since 2012 – slightly longer than Microsoft Azure (which hosts our technology) has been ‘Generally Available’. In those 9 years, Microsoft Azure has increased in price several times including by a staggering 26% in one jump in 2015. Microsoft are not alone by any means. Pretty much every major cloud platform regularly increases their pricing. For a while Salesforce even baked it into their contract that there was a 7% annual rise. 7% annual rise means doubling the price every 10 years. That’s quite a thing to commit to (to their credit we believe Salesforce have wisely removed this now). IAM Cloud, by contrast, has actually decreased in price since 2012. When we first created IAM Cloud it was bulky and inefficient and required a lot of resources to onboard customers, we’ve continually worked on making it more resource efficient, more scalable and easier to use. So despite more customers and users adopting our platform each year, we’ve actually managed to bring down our costs overall. We could just pocket all the profits for ourselves, but we think it’s fairer to split them with our customers by keeping our prices low and great value.
No spamming, paywalls or other cheap marketing tactics
We make a conscientious effort to go against the grain of conventional marketing and lead capture by making sure all our content is available without the need to sign-up to anything or give away your email address. You can sign-up to our email newsletter for the convenience of having it delivered to your inbox, but you can also read it online. If you do give us your details, we send no more than 1 marketing email per month, and normally only 1 per quarter. We don’t like our inboxes getting filled up with spam any more than you do, but we would be hypocrites to have that attitude and not do something about it ourselves. So we did.
No auto-renewals
If you’ve ever been caught out by an auto-renewal, and we have once or twice, you’ll have the same disdain for them as we do. If our customers sign-up for a 12-month contract, that’s all you sign-up for. After 12-months (more like 10 to provide decision/processing time) we specifically ask our customers if they want to renew their contract. We will not assume you want to continue and then lock you in for another 12-months, like certain SaaS companies do who we’d love to name and shame but won’t for the sake of professionalism.
No surprise charges
We sometimes find our customers under-estimate the number of users who need our software. So they may purchase 500 licenses but actually deploy the software to 750 people instead. Oversights happen.
What we won’t do is: randomly hit you with an out of the blue bill for an extra 250 users.
What we will do is: Get in touch with you to see what you want to do. We’ll ask whether you need the extra 250 users, or if they were perhaps provisioned by mistake. And if it was a mistake, we’ll give you the chance to reduce your user count without incurring the extra cost.
Giving Data Proper Respect (GDPR and beyond)
Some businesses found GDPR to be an annoyance, but we thought it was great. We think it’s about time organizations woke up to the reality of how important it is to respect data. Cookies and tracker ads have been discussed above, but beyond that we’re very careful in how we handle data. We are ISO27001 compliant – the international standard for information security management. If any user data is collected in our systems, none of it is shared with any other companies for any reason whatsoever. We only keep hold of the bare minimum of data required, and we regularly cleanse our systems of data that’s been inactive for 12 months. We’re a very transparent company, so if you ever have any questions for us about our data protection, privacy or security processes we’ll happily give you all the information you need.
