Originally Posted by Ryan

How can Jelsoft still have its own CEO (the same one as before) yet be owned by another company with its own CEO?

Originally Posted by Ryan

How can Jelsoft still have its own CEO (the same one as before) yet be owned by another company with its own CEO?

Originally Posted by James

Firstly, thank you all for your comments so far. I’m keen to answer as many questions as possible, and clarify any details of the deal or our vision for Jelsoft moving forward.

To touch on a couple of points that have been raised. Internet Brands is in the business of creating value. With Jelsoft, they are looking to work with us to improve every aspect of the company, helping us to scale up in terms of development, sales and marketing and customer service. After many weeks of discussions with their executive team, as well as a visit in person to their offices in Los Angeles, I am extremely confident that Internet Brands is very much in tune with the vision that we have for Jelsoft, and understands fully the dynamics of the market that we are serving. There is no intention of changing Jelsoft in a way that would impede on our core goal – to provide excellent, great value, community solutions.

From my perspective, it a very complimentary partnership - they have the scale and experience that can facilitate Jelsoft to grow and continue to provide solutions for our customers, and we have the expertise in this field that can only be gained by developing a product and being involved in this marketplace for seven years.

As a technical note about the structure of the deal – Jelsoft will continue to exist as a stand-alone company. All Jelsoft staff, including management, will remain the same, and the headquarters will continue to be in the UK. The ongoing development of products will continue as planned.

There have been a couple of points raised about the possible conflict of interest between IB’s existing communities and sites that may be run by our customers. I can assure you that there are no plans to restrict access to vBulletin for sites with topics that compete with other IB companies, or to add additional functionality to the IB communities that is not included in the product. Doing either of these would be anti-competitive, and is certainly not in keeping with the culture of Jelsoft or IB. In fact, it is more likely that custom code created by IB for their communities will also be included in vBulletin!

Onto the subject of product pricing. Since the first release of vBulletin 1.0 in 2000, we have never raised the price of vBulletin licenses. The key strategy moving forward is not to shift prices markedly upwards and make buying vBulletin an unattractive proposition, but rather to offer a broader range of products and services to better cater for all audiences. We are in business to serve our customers, and we need to continue to do just that in order to maintain competitive.

As a final point, I’m personally very excited to be working with IB. We have extremely ambition plans for the future, and I’m confident that with the additional support and resources from Internet Brands, we will continue to be able to provide great, well supported products and services.

Just to reiterate my thanks for all your comments so far... please keep them coming. I will continue to participate in this thread over the coming days, and am keen to reassure everyone that this is a great thing for Jelsoft and our customers moving forwards.

Many thanks,

James