"I'm a great exponent of open source software but it has to be good and it has to comply to open standards," Young said. "It's a point that is often lost because there's a lot of open source software that is poorly written, undocumented and unsupportive."

When Young's team of developers could not find a piece of open source software that met their demands, they wrote their own such as the popular in-process Java caching tool, Ehcache.

"When you're running a site that has over 65,000 user sessions per day and it's very busy for 20 hours of the day, the magnitude it handles could not be serviced by any of the caching products we looked at."

After the development team wrote and implemented Ehcache, it was released to the open source world where its popularity has made it one of the most widely used caching tools in the community, Young said.

To tie the development process with the aims of the business Young proposed that the company model its processes on agile programming methodologies. For a company that used to outsource software development and run on proprietary solutions, it was quite a big cultural change, but one that Young says the company has adapted to without any major hiccups.