Saturday, April 23, 2016

JaamSim Software Inc.

We have formed a new company, JaamSim Software Inc., to develop, promote, and support JaamSim simulation software. The software will continue to be free and open-source, and we have no plans to introduce a "premium" version. Revenue will come from a range of services provided by the company:
  • Technical support contracts. Similar to commercial software vendors, we can provide on-call technical support with guaranteed response times to resolve technical problems.
  • Introductory courses. Courses will be offered in Vancouver, Canada for both new-comers to simulation and for experienced analysts wishing to convert to JaamSim from other software.
  • Onsite training and technology transfer. Customized training can be provided for groups of employees on their company's premises.
  • Paid development of new features. When a user needs a new feature to build a model, we do our best to provide it in a timely fashion. However, if the feature is too specialized to receive a high priority in our development cycle, it may not become available soon enough to meet the user's timeline. In this case, a user can pay us to program the feature at hourly rates. Paid features will become part of free, open source code in the same way as normal features.
  • Preparation of client models. When building a complex new model, it is often more cost-effective for a company to pay us to prepare and hand over an initial version of the model. It is much easier to modify a well-designed model than it is to build one from scratch.
  • Custom palettes of new objects. Complex, highly-detailed models can be built more easily using specialized objects designed for that application. For example, it would be better to build a model of a road network using specialized objects such as vehicles, roads, traffic lights, etc. than using more abstract objects such as SimEntity, Server, Queue, etc. We can prepare palettes of these specialized objects to suit any industry.
Along with the company, we have introduced a new logo for JaamSim, shown above. The logo represents the magical wine-bowl or "Jaam-e Jam" from Persian mythology, which I described in an earlier post. JaamSim's name refers to both "JAva Animation Modelling and SIMulation" and the magical wine bowl. Divinations from the bowl "... were said to reveal deep truths".

Contact Dr. Harry King at d.harry.king@gmail.com for more information about the services we can provide.