Cruise ships are complicated places. From feeding passengers to ensuring they experience maritime luxury without giving up the modern-day comforts they’ve grown accustomed to on land, there’s a lot that can go wrong.
That’s where Sourcetoad comes in.
With offices in Tampa and Perth, Australia, the software development firm builds specialty products and services for the cruise industry, helping ships streamline onboard operations and meet passenger expectations.
Today’s cruise ships have a lot of offerings. “They have everything you'd find in a hotel, restaurant, immigration office, movie theater and playhouse,” said Greg Ross-Munro, Sourcetoad CEO. “But all of that is bundled into one package. Disconnect that package from the internet and you can’t really use the same off-the-shelf technology that you might use at a resort, because a lot of those technologies are cloud-based. And you can’t connect to the cloud if you’re sailing through a fjord.”
Ross-Munro founded Sourcetoad in 2008 with a $5,000 loan from a senior partner at his old investment banking firm. After a month, he broke even and has grown the company organically ever since. For the first few years, Sourcetoad was focused on building things like WiFi networks for hostels until a partner company asked about developing a network and TV system for a cruise ship.
“Before we knew it, we had the cruise lines calling us saying, ‘Hey, you guys seem to be able to do everything.’ It’s not that we can do everything, we just have good backend programing," Ross-Munro said.
Ross-Munro notes that many of today’s interactive technologies are built using website platforms.
“TV systems are websites that you control with a remote control. The interactive signage system is a website you control with a touchscreen," he said. "A lot of the modern apps use web technology. It's all that same kind of reusable technology, which of course makes us look like experts in tons of esoteric types hardware, but really everything is just running a web browser.”
Today, Sourcetoad employs 24 people out of its Tampa office and is looking to expand. The company has clients in cruise and hospitality industries, and provides software consulting services to Tampa Bay companies in the medical, financial tech and startup spheres. Among its eight clients, Sourcetoad counts Viking as its biggest. Depending on the scale of the project, the company’s products and services can range from $100,000 to upwards of $1 million. Ross-Munro said he expects the company’s revenue to be between $4 and $5 million in 2019.
