We've been using TNTmips for a few years now, and there are many
reasons why its our platform of choice, and why we wanted to represent
the software in our part of the world.  Here's a few of the key ones:

1.  Cost of ownership.  TNTmips is excellent value for money to start
with, but its the ongoing cost that is really important to companies
like ourselves.  We came from an ESRI and MapInfo backgrounds and as
an independent business that needs to run lean and hungry to manage
growth, restrictive licencing and high-cost maintenance really hurts.
We commonly deliver systems as web services, and if we did so using
other products, the more users we have, the more connection licences
we get stung with and the higher the cost of ownership becomes.  We
also need functionality on tap as every system we build needs facets
we've never built before.  With other products this would mean having
to purchase and maintain new extensions.  Often those extensions are
3rd party and that in turn raises the time cost in support and
ultimately leads to higher cost of ownership.  Likewise if we have to
add extensions every time we build a new system, what's the return on
investment of the original software?  Not much is the short answer.
Speaking from an Economic point of view, building a business with
TNTmips, and the rest of the TNT suite, just makes good financial
sense.

2.  Support.  Everyone needs it.  In the past I have been involved
with helpdesks for other GIS products and know very well how they are
conducted in a way that drives sales rather than supporting users.
When you have a support query, you want answers as soon as possible.
In competing software houses you may call support and be told it will
be looked into and two weeks later you receive a message to tell you
its a software flaw.  Typically you may be told that if you wait for
the next upgrade that will be in 6 months and will cost extra, or you
can buy an extension that you mostly won't need now and it will fix
the problem for just another six thousand dollars.  That doesn't do
you or your business any favours.  On the other hand the support from
MicroImages is quite phenomenal.  We are at the opposite end of the
clock to the MicroImages crew in our time zone and yet if we lodge a
support query at the end of our day, there is detailed help when we
arrive back in the office the next day.  Furthermore, the support team
really understand all facets of the software, and while there are
specialists when needed, genuine help is never far away.  For us
however the best thing about MicroImages' support services is that
they think hard about every query and when customers need
functionality that could be added to the software and would benefit
all users, it may be built in for the future.  This type of support is
very user focussed, so for us as high traffic and platform oriented
users the level of support available from TNTmips and the MicroImages
team is many times better than anything we have ever experienced
before and a core reason for using the products.

3.  Flexibility.  We are system integrators as much as anything, so we
need software that can talk with anything.  We are faced with obscure
formats, unsupported databases, stubborn suppliers and all the things
that go along with being data agnostic on a daily basis.  When we look
to build a solution for a client, we first do our homework on their
business as a whole.  Typically we have graphical packages, databases,
cad systems, other spatial products, hardware based systems, mobile
connectivity and sundry other systems in use that we need to pull
together into one nice holistic system.  TNTmips is like a universal
translator in that it can understand and re-communicate to many
different  sectors.  What's more, it can natively use data from 3rd
party systems with ease, meaning that operators are in the box seat
for dealing with data.  Its very common for clients we take on to have
invested huge money, and possibly backed the wrong horse, in certain
products.  From their perspective, they don't want to pull the pin on
a large scale investment and want someone to make it work the way it
always should have.  If that means they have spent a million dollars
on a non-relational database built in Visual Smalltalk for example,
they will not be ultimately receptive to being told they can have a
spatial system with all the extras as long as they change all their
data to fit a new format that will work spatially but will also mean
they can't communicate data back to suit their need.  Of course
TNTmips isn't just flexible in a data sense.  As you are no doubt
aware its platform independent, has a small footprint for a complex
software, is non modular so it expands in its delivery as your needs
increase.  Furthermore, when used in combination with TNTserver, can
be used to deliver your data to end users without the need for
multiple low usage software licences.  Flexibility is extremely
important to us as technical people, and also to us as a business as
it contributes greatly to the cost of ownership and return on
investment as noted above.

4.  Speed and power.  TNTmips is fast.  Lightning fast compared to
many software's of this nature.  We have massive databanks here and
that data needs top be processed and moved automatically in many
cases.  Big data has always been a strength with TNTmips, and our
internal benchmarks border on unbelievable at times.  In running a
very complex network analysis TNTmips did the job 322% faster than the
next fastest GIS product for instance.  Even then the benchmark on
MapInfo was unfair against TNTmips as the other product simply
couldn't produce the results as completely as TNTmips.  In reality if
the other product could have matched the functionality, the speed of
operation would have made it impractical for production use.  More
notably than outright speed is the sheer power of the software.  Where
else can you switch from Network analysis to basic cartography, to 3D
CAD and then to HyperSpectral analysis without changing software.
That is serious horsepower in anyone's language.  Moreover since Mike
and his team have working on the underlying architecture, the
processing power has grown greater still.  There is a flyer in the
MicroImages materials from some years ago that uses the tagline of
'Tools, not toys'.  We believe that to be truer than ever with TNTmips
in comparison to other products.

5.  Evolution.  TNTmips and the rest of the products in the
MicroImages suite have evolved with us, our technologies and industry
standards.  When the spatial world moves, TNTmips moves with it.  In
fact often ahead of it.  In something as simple as coordinate
reference systems, our newest system (NZTM/NZGD2000) was available in
TNTmips several years before it was in other products.  We like to
think we are at the cutting edge with some of our systems.  The only
reason we are is because TNTmips allows us to be and continues to
evolve as fast as we operate.

One could wax lyrical about the virtues of the software all day, but
the above represents what I see as the core reasons we chose this
path.  Its also why our clients come to use for outsourcing and custom
applications - we have the flexibility that TNTmips affords us.  I for
one wouldn't choose anything else.

Best regards,

Stu

Stuart Bell
Technical Director
Frontier Global