Jadu - Company History

Company History

The company was founded by Suraj Kika and Richard Chamberlain in 1999. The system was first developed for the Department of Trade and Industry (now Department of Energy and Climate Change) for the UK consultation portal for Oil and Gas and Renewable Energy.

The software developed for the Offshore-SEA website, an environmental portal managed by geological and oceanographic specialists Geotek, then became Jadu Content Management Engine Version 1 — and was implemented for scientific organisations in the UK as a means to publish complex electronic documents generated in MS Word and PDF formats.

In 2001 the system was redeveloped in PHP and MySQL and a Version 2 was deployed for UK Government and Local Authorities. Based on the e-GIF standards, and using XForms, the system was deployed at the beginning of the first acceptance and adoption of open source platforms within Government. Jadu as a company has a cross platform approach, preferring to develop its software to be agnostic in terms of operating platform and development framework.

In 2008, Jadu launched a .NET compliant binary of the Jadu CMS supporting IIS, MS SQL and the .NET 2.0 framework using the Phalanger which compiles PHP to CLR (Microsoft's Common Language Runtime) effectively enabling any PHP application to run natively under the .NET framework.

Jadu have funded and are supporting the development of Phalanger, including leading the development of VisualStudio.NET support as well as other upgrades to PHP support in .NET. With this new framework under .NET 2.0 and .NET 3.0, Jadu CMS can be extended in C# or any other .NET compiled language using Visual Studio.

Using the Phalanger compiler, Jadu CMS (or any other PHP based applications) and the front end web templates are compiled down to two DLLs. - bringing together two fiercely competitive programming disciplines together - making PHP interoperable with the .NET framework.

Jadu's Head of Design and User Interface Lee Pilmore was the designer responsible for Lichfield District Council becoming the first UK Local Authority to win a Webby Award Official Honoree status and The City of Edinburgh Council website, which was awarded a top 4-star rating as "the best Local Government Website in Scotland" by SOCITM.

In 2007, Jadu's design for Kettering Borough Council (designed by Lee Pilmore) was nominated a finalist for the CSS category in the SXSW (South by South West) awards - for "pushing the boundaries of CSS coding technology, bringing together top-notch design and content with standards compliant and accessible code"

In 2008, Jadu launched Manchester City Council's website using the Jadu CMS, which won the BT Online Excellence award as the Best Local Government website in Britain.

In January 2011, executives from Jadu were invited to a private round table discussion with UK Prime Minister, David Cameron to consult with Jadu over barriers to business growth in the UK

In October 2011, the company announced the 'Weejot' Mobile web app publishing service. Described as a network for easily developing and publishing mobile web apps to handheld mobile and tablet devices in real-time using HTML5, CSS3 and JQuery Mobile.

In February 2012, Jadu announced that their 'Jadu Universe Cloud' service, a platform for SaaS CMS, forms, search and mobile products was selected as a preferred supplier into the UK Government CloudStore. On its website, Jadu stated that Jadu Universe Cloud services can be purchased by public sector organisations directly from Cloudstore without an Official Journal of the European Union tender process, which represents a significant step change in UK Government procurement. Chris Chant, the Cabinet Office Executive Director confirmed that the Government was "making it easy for the public sector to buy a vast range of services – and so easy that they can try things out at nominal cost before taking it on for a whole organisation."