Equinus Independent Reviews 2008/09 Travel Technology Guide
Equinus Independent Supplier Review
Squiz
www.Squiz.co.uk
Ten years ago three forward thinking Australians founded a company named Squiz to develop
an open source content management system for websites. “An open what?” you might ask!
Open source software is freely distributed with its source code. Anyone can download the
software for free and develop it further. The Open Source Initiative (www.opensource.org)
sets standards and defines how open software should be managed and distributed.
Content Management Systems (CMS) help websites publish, distribute and manage large and
often dynamic content inventories, such as text, images and data files. The more advanced
can also act as glue between the website and back-office or third party systems, such as
reservations, document management and CRM. MySource Matrix is the open source CMS
that Squiz developed.
Squiz believes open source is good for business and really benefits from widespread
distribution and customer feedback. The free licence ensures volume usage and encourages
invaluable input and ideas from the user community. Customers know more about their
business than suppliers and soon identify product improvements and new functionality. This
philosophy clearly works, as Squiz operates a very successful business model with over 1,200
revenue generating customers worldwide, is debt free and employs over 140 people in offices
throughout Australia, New Zealand and the UK. Squiz makes its money by helping
enterprises to implement and develop MySource Matrix and create content and functionally
rich websites.
So what has this to do with the travel industry?
Squiz UK was setup in 2003 and soon gained Future Publishing as a customer. The following
year Mark Warner and U.S. Airtours were using MySource. Squiz recognised that travel was
not unlike publishing and needed to manage and distribute dynamic content, including price
and availability as well as product descriptions and images. The content was often stored in
disparate systems which had to be collated and represented to respond to the visitor’s specific
requirements.
More recent travel customers include Transun, David Urquhart Travel and Premier Holidays.
Most travel customers operate reservation systems from different suppliers and MySource
easily integrates with these, combining price and availability with traditional brochure content.
MySource is more than a CMS. It provides the hub that collates data, handles workflow and
underpins the website.
Squiz UK employs 30 people in London and has doubled annual revenue, year on year. The
original business philosophy was obviously sound and MySource is still available on a free
licence. Today website operators are moving away from legacy CMS solutions which haven’t
benefitted from the MySource community that is continually developing new functionality and
improvements. Increasingly they are turning to Squiz.
Interestingly Squiz appears in an Australian phrase “take a squiz” meaning “take a look at”.
So if you need to upgrade your travel website to benefit from a well proven and future proofed
CMS, Squiz might be the one to look at?
www.equinus.com
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