ComponentOne

Founded in 1980, our corporate headquarters is located in Sendai, Japan, with operations spanning throughout the United States and Asia. GrapeCity is the world's largest component vendor. Our award-winning tools benefit leading corporations, software companies, and independent consultants around the world as a cost-effective solution for building distributed enterprise-wide applications for commercial or in-house use. From the CEO to our newest team member, our goals are the same: to provide you with the innovative tools and support you need to thrive in today's competitive development market.

Our success stems from our use of a proven global delivery model that draws on our extensive software development experience (including development of our own industry-leading products and components for the North American and Asian markets). In addition, we hire only the best and brightest for our global development centers, while maintaining a local footprint to ensure our clients of timely communication and a high level of customer service.

GrapeCity is an award-winning Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, a premier Visual Studio Industry Partner and one of the world’s largest providers of developer components. The company has more than 850 employees and hundreds of thousands of customers worldwide. For more than 30 years, GrapeCity has provided enterprises around the world with state-of-the-art developer tools and components, software services and solutions.

To learn more about GrapeCity, please visit http://www.grapecity.com.

Yes. We are pleased to announce that the US GrapeCity PowerTools division will be renamed to ComponentOne. The ComponentOne brand name is so strong in the market that the US GrapeCity PowerTools name had proudly been rebranded as ComponentOne. We will also be using the ComponentOne brand in every Asian company outside of Japan. ComponentOne has been a longtime partner of GrapeCity in Japan. In addition, the two companies have been friendly competitors in the US, by doing joint marketing campaigns and sharing technical information. The synergy between the two companies has always been very good, and as a result the transition has been very smooth.

Everything. GrapeCity has been reselling ComponentOne products in Japan since 1994, and has the incentive and the resources to take ComponentOne products to a new level and do it on an international stage. This combination of resources is a great fit for our customers in terms of complimentary product offerings, sales and support, and our continuing advancement of technology innovation. ComponentOne and Grape City are very serious about being number one in the business of data visualization, business intelligence, and web technologies. It means that no matter what platforms developers use to create applications we will deliver the tools to help them create amazing, beautifully-polished applications in much less time.

There will be very little impact on our customers between now and July 1st. Customers will continue to contact sales and support personnel as they have in the past. New messaging and content will begin to appear on the ComponentOne and GrapeCity PowerTools websites. Otherwise, you will see very little change in terms of how to do business with and interact with ComponentOne and GrapeCity PowerTools teams. Starting July 1st, we will begin operating as a single company with merged websites, shopping carts, sales, and support organizations.

The acquisition will have no impact on your current subscription service. You will continue to receive the same benefits for the coverage period that you had before the acquisition.

No. The Spread and ActiveReports products are licensed separately from the collection of ComponentOne Studio product offerings. Existing ComponentOne customers that have an interest in Spread and/or ActiveReports will need to purchase separate subscriptions for these products.

No. ActiveReports, Spread, and ActiveAnalyis will continue to be sold independently. There are no immediate plans to offer one comprehensive Studio that will include these products; however, we will continue to monitor the situation and will adjust our offerings based on the needs and requests of our customers. For the full list of what’s inside the current ComponentOne Ultimate product, please visit the ComponentOne Ultimate product page.

It does not. Our release schedule will remain as it is today. We will still have three releases per year, in the months of March, July, and November.

It will not. Doc-To-Help is and will continue to be our help authoring solution for all platforms.

Spread is essentially Microsoft Excel, packaged as a control. It has practically all of Excel's functionality built in, including features such as charting, grouping, formula support, and more. Features unique to Spread include formula calculations using over 300 built-in Excel functions, Excel-like conditional formatting, and full featured import/export of Excel XLS and XLSX documents, including formulas, charts, sparklines, borders, cell formatting, and more.

The FlexGrid and TrueDBGrid controls, on the other hand, are traditional data grid controls. They offer great performance and customizability, both in terms of appearance and behavior.

If you would like to have Excel embedded in your applications, then Spread is the logical choice. If you need traditional data grid functionality, then you should consider FlexGrid or TrueDBGrid.

ActiveReports and ComponentOne Reports share a great set of features including:

• Rich API reporting model
• Data visualization controls, plus textboxes, tables, charts, and barcodes
• Royalty-free banded report designers
• Import Crystal and Access report definitions

There are some differences between the two products, each having their own set of unique features. For example, ActiveReports has a fast, lightweight reporting engine and comes with a RDL report designer that includes Region Reports and Fixed Page Reports. Whereas, ComponentOne Reports offers a rich document object model for extensive run-time access to the report output.

So when do you use ActiveReports and when do you use ComponentOne Reports? For new projects, we recommend you use ActiveReports because of its superior performance and ability to handle extremely large data sets. If your project already uses C1Report, or if you need to customize your reports after they have been generated, then ComponentOne Reports is a better choice.

In the short term, we recommend you should keep using the reporting product you are using now. In the future, we will integrate our reporting solutions so users will have the best possible compatibility, features, and performance. The integrated solution will be able to consume report definition files from ActiveReports and ComponentOne Reports, and migration from the existing products will be very easy.

No, they have not. Our phone support hours will remain 9am-5pm EST. We will continue to answer support incidents submitted over the web within 2 business days (1 business day for Platinum customers).

ComponentOne support will be unchanged. You can submit a question using the MySupport portal or ask your question in our community. Platinum support customers can continue to call our phone support number at 412.681.4738 for assistance.

Starting July 1, 2012, GrapeCity PowerTools customers will be able to submit a question using our MySupport portal or ask their questions in the community for their respective products: Spread forums and ActiveReports/ActiveAnalysis forums. Customers who have purchased a maintenance agreement will now call 412.681.4738 for phone support.

We have no immediate plans to discontinue/sunset any of our products. If at some time in the future we decide to do that, then the following applies:

1. We will always provide an upgrade path to existing customers.
2. We will always continue to maintain all products as long as they are being used by our customers. This includes bug fixes and technical support. "Sunsetting" means we will no longer add new features to a product.
3. We have a proven track record in this regard, being the only major component vendor that still sells and supports ActiveX controls.

Nothing changes in the short term. The GrapeCity PowerTools and ComponentOne support teams will continue to provide support to customers worldwide as they have in the past. Open tickets will be handled and responses provided to customers through the normal support channels. Starting July 1, 2012, the GrapeCity PowerTools and ComponentOne support teams will be merged into one support team. Additional information will be shared with our customers as these changes are implemented.

Customers wanting to purchase ComponentOne and GrapeCity PowerTools products today can:

• Purchase via the ComponentOne or GrapeCity PowerTools online website shopping carts.
• Contact either ComponentOne or GrapeCity PowerTools offices by email or phone.
• Purchase through the existing networks of worldwide distributors and resellers.

Starting July 1st, customers will be able to purchase all ComponentOne and GrapeCity PowerTools products from a single shopping cart on the ComponentOne website, by calling ComponentOne headquarters in Pittsburgh, PA, or by contacting the combined network of resellers and distributors that will be listed on the ComponentOne website.

There is no change to product pricing. All product prices remain the same as they were prior to the acquisition.

All existing reseller and distributor agreements will remain intact and unchanged through June 30, 2012. Existing reseller/distributor agreements will need to be reassigned to the new ComponentOne, a Division of GrapeCity company and will become effective July 1, 2012. For additional information, please contact the ComponentOne Channel Sales team in Pittsburgh.