CATS, an applicant tracking solution, hit the market to much fanfare in 2006. Although throwing its hat into an already-crowded ring, the company cut through the clutter with an open source model that was free and gave users the ability to take the code and tweak it how they wished. Sort of like popular open source blog software Wordpress.
Two years in and the company has abandoned its open source platform – possibly the very thing that made it famous in the first place – to become a more traditional applicant tracking system best associated with sites like Taleo, PC Recruiter or My Staffing Pro.
The move inspired us to check-in and see what was going on.
“We were hoping we’d build momentum and have people contribute to the code,” said Asim Baig, President and Founder. “That didn’t happen. After getting only 29 new lines of code added to the hundreds of thousands we had, we reached the conclusion that we had to generate revenue to keep the project going.”
All is not lost, however. Although the phrase “open source” cannot even be found on their homepage, the code is still out there and legally usable under specific terms. OpenCATS.org, for example, is a group still offering the code to users a la open source.
For now though, the company is hoping to lure paying customers and to take on the traditional players with what Baig says is better simplicity and speed. “We don’t come with a training manual” he proudly comments. And he may be onto something. At a cost of $29/month/user (or free for small shops), the company claims between new 400-500 users each month. Seventy percent are recruiting firms versus direct employers.
To date the company has done little to no marketing and claims much of its success to word of mouth and search engine optimization. “If you were to type in ‘applicant tracking system’ in Google, the first thing to pop up is CATS,” said Sameer Sitaram, the company’s marketing head.
Search engine traffic plays an important role in how CATS helps its clients as well. This is a significant difference when compared to many other ATS’s where jobs might as well be invisible as far as Google goes.
Each site CATS powers is complete with a search engine-friendly link to browse job content. A search for client Kiesling reveals a good number of job postings indexed. It’s not a perfect system (title tags could be customized, for example), but they’re in Google for a pretty inexpensive pricetag.
The future looks pretty interesting for the company as well. Baig promises to rollout a job board in the next 12 mos., possibly taking on companies like JobTarget. Additionally, look for an affiliate program to help spur low-cost promotion. For more on the future, listen to the clip below:
CATS’ Future Plans
The company is self-funded and employs 6 people. For more, checkout www.catsone.com. There’s an online demo and a blog too. To listen to the entire interview, uncut, subscribe to our feed on iTunes.
Popularity: 12% [?]
October 1st, 2008 at 6:09 pm
Dude, this title is deceiving. Where’s the LOL picture?
October 1st, 2008 at 8:59 pm
To be fair to the open source community, it was incredibly difficult to submit code to the CATS project when it was open source. This difficulty came from their proprietary license (CPL – a MPL variation) and having to sign an agreement with Cognizo.
Other open source projects, like Asterisk, follow a similar model of requiring signatures before being able to contribute to the codebase. Cognizo’s slow speed of execution for accepting contributions, however, simply made it more frustrating than rewarding for developers to contribute to this project.
October 2nd, 2008 at 8:28 am
We’ll see – its a red ocean out here. But competition is always good for the market place…. ;-)
October 2nd, 2008 at 9:50 am
Eric… the license may still be the same at OpenCATS – but there’s a similar dearth of contributions to the code. Get logged onto svn and submit ‘em…
October 5th, 2008 at 2:05 am
I am currious about your opinion regarding the applicant tracking sofwware industry and our impending economic recession.
I have a website called Comparehris.com that currently offers, articles, selection tools, and a forum for specifically the HRIS Software industry. We will be looking in the near future at expanding the site to include not only HRIS applicatons but also applicant tracking and perfomance management software applications.
In your opinion who are the biggest companies in each of these industries?
July 9th, 2009 at 7:12 pm
While the original email that Asim responded to was incorrect about GPL licensing, it was correct about pulling source. This followed a request for source that Asim refused to make available, source that was linked to on their previous CATS website but the source files had been pulled because Asim didn’t feel that the open-source community deserved access to it. It was interesting to see a blatant attack by Asim on somebody that questioned him and simply didn’t agree with what he did. This is not the mark of a good leader.
July 2008
First off, next time when you write to us, dont hide behind an e-mail address. Have the courage to identify yourself. You obviously have no idea about this project, its history, or for that matter what open source is all about. Go educate yourself with open source and study other open source projects before you criticize what we did. CATS IS/WAS NOT GPL. Never was, never used a single line of GPL code, so please spare me your legal opinion.
Give me a call and I will be more then happy to speak with you and explain to you why we did what we did. There’s nothing that we did that was unethical or questionable. Your e-mail on the other hand shows complete lack of knowledge of even basic “business 101″. Let me guess, you write open source software and live off of donations of your user from Paypal. No wait, you are a recruiter who charges hefty fees for your services, yet think that the world should labor and give you high quality software for free.
In any case, just don’t bother responding if you cant tell me who you are, what your profession is, and how CATS open source discontinuation affected you.
Asim Baig
Cognizo Technologies
10501 Wayzata Blvd., Suite 100
Minnetonka, MN 55305
(952) 232-0880 x101
CATS – Free Applicant Tracking System
CATS Applicant Tracking System – Update wrote:
—–@——.— has unsubscribed
Reason given:
I find it unacceptable and of questionable legality that
opensource-developed software which was made available under GPL licensing
and was already made publicly available was pulled because you did not feel
you received an acceptable ROI when collaborating with the opensource
community. Once a product is made available opensource, standard practice
and proper etiquette is to keep it available, something that you failed to
do with all but the extremely old opensource versions of your software. It
is a shame that a company started with good intentions has to behave in
such a manner for any reason.