About
We started by leaving the licence out of it
Founded in 2018 in Manchester. 210 people across five practices and three UK offices, doing one thing: deploying and running open-source business platforms.
How we got here
Ruth Ashworth spent eleven years running delivery for a mid-market ERP reseller. Samuel Ganges spent most of a decade in platform engineering at a UK hosting provider, being paged about other people’s deployments. They kept running into the same two organisations: one paying a great deal for software it barely used, and one that had adopted open source to escape that and then discovered nobody was going to patch it.
SoftOpen was founded in 2018 on the premise that those are the same problem seen from different ends. The software being free does not make it cheap to run — it moves the cost from a licence line to an operating one, and that is only an improvement if somebody carries it competently.
We are now 210 people. We deploy five platforms and no more, because a consultancy claiming expertise in thirty has expertise in none. We have never invoiced a client for a software licence, which means we have never had a reason to recommend one they did not need.
- Platform deployments
- 900+Platform deploymentsSince 2018
- Environments managed
- 640+Environments managedProduction and non-production
- Hosting uptime
- 99.97%Hosting uptimeMeasured, rolling 12 months
- Upstream contributions
- 4,000+Upstream contributionsAcross the five projects we deploy
- Specialists
- 210SpecialistsAcross five practices
- UK offices
- 3UK officesManchester, London, Edinburgh
- Support renewal rate
- 94%Support renewal rateFinancial year 2025/26
- Paid in software licences
- £0Paid in software licencesBy any client, ever
How we operate
Four positions we hold, including the inconvenient ones
You own the outcome, not a subscription to it
Every platform we deploy is yours: the software, the data, the configuration and the infrastructure it runs on. If you stopped working with us tomorrow, you would keep a running system and the runbooks that explain it. We have handed over on good terms more than once, and we would rather that than a client who cannot leave.
We do not sell licences, so we have no reason to oversell
The software is free. Our revenue is deployment, support and hosting, which means we have no incentive to recommend a bigger edition or an extra seat count. When the honest answer is that you need less than you asked for, that is what you get — it costs us nothing to say it.
Configuration over customisation
We deliver through each platform’s supported extension points, and we do not fork upstream code. A fork looks cheaper in month one and becomes the reason you cannot upgrade in year three. Where a genuine gap exists we build a proper extension, versioned and tested against upstream releases.
Evidence, not assurances
Migrations ship with reconciliation reports. Deployments ship with verification output. Support comes with a quarterly service review against measured figures rather than a summary of how we feel it went. If we cannot show you the evidence, we have not finished.
Leadership
Who runs the company
Eight people, all of whom still work on client engagements.
Ruth Ashworth
Chief Executive Officer, co-founder
Ruth spent eleven years running delivery for a mid-market ERP reseller before concluding that the licence was the least valuable part of what clients were buying. She founded SoftOpen with Samuel in 2018 on the opposite premise. She still sits in on the first scoping call for any engagement over sixty days, on the grounds that most projects go wrong in the first fortnight and nobody notices until month four.
Samuel Ganges
Chief Technology Officer, co-founder
Samuel came out of platform engineering at a UK hosting provider, where he spent most of a decade being paged about other people’s deployments. He owns the technical standards every SoftOpen engagement is held to, and the position that we do not fork upstream code. He is a committer on two of the five projects we deploy and reviews every extension we ship before it reaches a client.
Daniel Okonkwo
Chief Operating Officer
Daniel joined in 2021 to build the operating structure a forty-person consultancy could not keep improvising. He owns resourcing, commercial governance and the quarterly service reviews. He is the reason SoftOpen quotes ranges rather than single numbers: he audited three years of engagements and found the fixed quotes were wrong far more often than the ranges were.
Joshua Goodwin
VP Sales
Joshua leads the commercial team and, unusually for the role, has a hard rule against committing to anything the delivery practice has not already sized. He spends most of his week on scoping calls rather than pipeline reviews. If you ask him whether a platform will do something it does not currently do, he will tell you so and then tell you what building it would cost.
Fiona Brennan
Managing Director, Delivery
Fiona runs all five delivery practices. She came from manufacturing systems implementation and has opinions, loudly held, about go-live dates chosen to suit a board meeting rather than a shop floor. Every engagement plan crosses her desk. The ones that get sent back are usually the ones with no hypercare period and an optimistic view of how much data cleansing the client will do themselves.
Marcus Bell
Director of Managed Services
Marcus runs hosting and the support desk out of Edinburgh, including the 24/7 rota. He publishes the uptime figure every quarter whether or not it flatters us, and he introduced the practice of testing restores rather than merely taking backups — after inheriting a client whose nightly backup had been writing zero bytes for seven months.
Anjali Menon
Director of Data & Migration
Anjali owns the migration practice, which is the part of a platform project most likely to be underestimated and the part clients ask about least during procurement. She built the reconciliation reporting that every SoftOpen migration now ships with. Her standing position is that a migration is not finished when the data lands — it is finished when someone in finance agrees the totals.
Owen Tasker
Chief Information Security Officer
Owen holds the ISO 27001 certification and the relationship with our penetration testers. He also owns the least popular policy in the company: we do not support platform versions past upstream end-of-life, no matter how stable they look. He would rather lose a renewal than carry an unpatchable system on our infrastructure, and has done.
Practices
Practice directors and principals
The people who lead the work on each platform.
ERPNext
Nadia Cheng
Practice Director, ERPNext
Leads our largest practice. Fifteen years in finance and stock systems before open source.
Tomasz Wójcik
Principal Consultant, ERPNext
Chart of accounts, multi-company structures, and the awkward parts of tax configuration.
Beth Lomax
Senior Consultant, Manufacturing
Production planning and BOMs. Spent six years on the other side, running an MRP system.
Observability
Callum Reid
Practice Director, Observability
Builds dashboards against what your services actually do, not against a template.
Sofia Marchetti
Principal Site Reliability Engineer
Alert design. Holds that an alert nobody acts on is worse than no alert at all.
Collaboration
Idris Bello
Practice Director, Collaboration
Self-hosted messaging, retention policy and compliance export for regulated clients.
Content platforms
Hannah Pryce
Practice Director, Content Platforms
Content modelling and editor experience. Measures success by how rarely editors call us.
Jack Ferreira
Principal .NET Engineer
Umbraco delivery, integrations and the upgrade path nobody planned for.
CRM
Leo Nakamura
Principal Consultant, CRM
Pipeline modelling and CRM imports. Has migrated off most of the incumbents at least once.
Data & migration
Grace Adeyemi
Principal Migration Engineer
Reconciliation reporting and dry runs at production volume. Writes our migration guidance.
Stefan Novák
Senior Migration Engineer
Source profiling and mapping design. Finds the field that means three different things.
Platform
Aisha Rahman
Chief Architect
Owns reference architectures across all five platforms and every extension design review.
Rory MacLeod
Principal Platform Engineer
Environments, infrastructure-as-code and the deployment pipeline behind every engagement.
Support
Yusuf Demir
Head of Support Operations
Runs the desk and the on-call rota. Publishes the response figures every quarter.
And 188 more
This page shows the people a client actually meets — the leadership team and the practice directors and principals who lead engagements. The rest of the company is:
- Delivery consultants and engineers
- Managed-services and support staff
- Data migration engineers
- Operations, finance and people
We are not publishing a staff directory. You will meet your delivery team at kick-off, and they will be the same people at go-live.
Where we are
Three UK offices
Manchester
Head office · 128 peopleLondon
Client delivery · 54 peopleEdinburgh
Managed services · 28 peopleWho we work with
Eight sectors
- Manufacturing and engineering
- Logistics and distribution
- Pharmaceutical and life sciences
- Professional services
- Charity and social housing
- Utilities
- Private healthcare
- Public sector suppliers
We do not work in every sector, and we will tell you if yours has a regulatory dimension we have not handled before.
Working here
We hire consultants, engineers and support staff across all three offices. There is no jobs board — send us something and tell us what you want to work on.