Company Overview

Cactusoft is a software developer operating from offices in London, England and Dubai, UAE. The company specializes in the development of database-driven web software for the Microsoft platform.

The company was originally founded in a spare bedroom in Hampshire, England back in early 1998. It quickly moved through a couple of local offices before relocating to Tolworth Tower on the outskirts of southwest London. Cactusoft specialized intially in online job board development, but in 1999 the company's e-commerce product 'CactuShop' was launched. This was built on classic ASP and despite being rather basic by today's standards, filled a need for a usable ASP cart product. CactuShop has been continually developed since then, introducing concepts such as 'skinning' that are now commonplace among all cart packages.

In 2005, Cactusoft opened an new office in Dubai, UAE which was instrumental in producing a newer version of CactuShop as well as handling some job board system work for non-UK customers.

In 2007, full development of a new e-commerce product based on ASP.NET was started. This developed into the present 'Kartris' package. While elements of the interface and layout will be familiar to users of CactuShop, the database was completely restructured to give improvements in performance, flexibility and scalability and the code was written completely from scratch using best practices.

Kartris launched in beta in 2009, and was fully released in 2010. In August 2010, it was added to the Microsoft Web App Gallery which provides simple installation of free applications directly through IIS, Web Matrix, the MS Web Platform Installer, and is also syndicated to web hosts around the world.

In April 2011, Kartris 1.3 was released which is the first version to include source code for pages, controls, masterpages and the DAL and BLL.