One person, one product, and a deployment that runs without me.

VERA did not start as a product idea. It started because I was working inside a national forensic laboratory and kept watching the same thing happen: an extraction arrives, most of it is never opened, and the part nobody could read was the part nobody had a tool for.

That origin shows up in the design in ways that would be difficult to reach from outside. The unit of work is the seal rather than the file, because that is how a case is actually organised. Evidence access is read only everywhere, because nothing else is acceptable in a laboratory. Every generated mapping has to be accepted by a human, because an examiner is professionally responsible for what goes into the report and no amount of automation transfers that.

It also means the first users were examiners who had no reason to be polite about it. That is the most useful thing that can happen to a piece of software this early.

This is the right question to ask a supplier of this size, and the answer has two halves that both need to be true.

The technical half: a deployment that requires no internet connection, no licence server and no vendor access does not stop working because the vendor did. It carries on doing exactly what it did the day before, indefinitely. That is a consequence of the offline architecture rather than a promise.

The contractual half: source escrow with an independent third party and a perpetual licence on the deployed version can both go into the contract. The deployment is documented so that a competent team can operate and rebuild it without me. That documentation exists because I cannot reach into a customer's network to fix anything, which is a constraint I imposed on myself and which turns out to be the reason continuity is answerable.