Matthew Taylor, Chairman, Tut Systems:

"The World Wide Web was upon us, and we needed a new product for our phone company customers. The product was easy to define, just use our hardware technology to transmit lots of bits, long distances over crummy telephone wire, collect traffic from several customers into one aggregation box in the central office, and pass that traffic off to a great big router. The only thing new that we had to do was add a processor and a lot of software. That's when the problems started. We were a hardware company. We didn't have a single software engineer let alone a whole team. It was the late '90s and it would have taken us well over a year just to hire a team capable of the project. The market was ready to explode and we couldn't wait.

We started looking for contractors, thinking that we could somehow collect enough of them and communicate well enough with them that they might form a team and somehow do the software that we needed. Instead of piecemealing a team together we were lucky enough to find MSB Associates. They were a complete software department, all the way from the product marketing definition through product release. They came into the company, set up the department, and went to work.

Thanks to MSB Associates the product came out on time, the company was able to capitalize on one of the biggest market phenomena ever, and we had the time to hire an in-house software team to take the company's products forward."