25 years in the Tech industry, Part 2.
Part 2 of our blog about our experiences in the tech industry takes us into the dawn of not just a new decade, but a new century too.
Following our previous article we now take a look at a new decade and a new century – 2000.
As with before there is plenty of tech industry and general nostalgia – some things you may remember, others you may have forgotten over time. Ultimately, we take a look at the changing programming landscape and what it meant for new companies such as Merisis.
The 2000’s – a new century dawned and there was a lot to take in…
On the positive side of things, the Summer Olympics were held in Sydney in the year 2000. Officially called the “Games of the XXVII Olympiad” it was one where England had made a bid to host (with Manchester being the ‘host’ city), but ultimately lost out to Australia. In terms of the medal table, Great Britain came a fairly respectable 10th.
Also of note for this decade was the € Euro entering circulation, the creation of the role of Mayor of London and the retirement of the Anglo-French supersonic airliner, Concorde.
Unfortunately, the early 2000’s are also remembered for a dramatic and downright horrifying event – the 9/11 terror attacks in New York. The world really seemed to have changed at this moment.
The rise of tech and the decline of the high street
The economic landscape didn’t fare too well at this time either – a case brought to home when UK stalwart Woolworth closed its doors in 2009 representing the decline of the high street had truly begun. Many fingers of blame regarding such retail struggles were aimed firmly at the rise of online shopping, however Woolworth’s online presence only lasted a further six years.
Just a few years before Woolies disappeared from our streets, we suffered a global financial crisis leading to recession. This decade was certainly hitting hard. Despite all these challenges, the world of tech still moved at great pace.
Internet use rose from 6.7 to 25.7% of the world’s population and Web 2.0 (and broadband internet) meant users had a more visual experience with images and video. Many familiar websites were created in the 2000’s, such as Wikipedia (2001), Google Earth (2001), iTunes (2001), Facebook (2004), YouTube (2005) and Spotify (2008).
What this meant for consumers
If the 1990’s saw tech becoming more synonymous with consumers, then the early 2000’s certainly saw this notion cemented. Tech was well and truly established as part of everyday life: mobile phones, games consoles, cars – the list is endless. More people had more computers which were easier to use and faster than before. The humble pen and paper was becoming rarer in the business context and information was well and truly digital.
Servers at this point (predominantly IBM for most FTSE-sized companies) were becoming smaller and more advanced. Previously they were huge – anywhere between 100-150 ft long and could fill an entire room, but the ever-advancing nature of tech meant the correlation between processing scale and physical size was changing.
Remember the IBM mantra from our first blog? An alternative take on it was “you never got sacked for buying IBM” due to its robust reliability and backwards compatibility. It was expensive but never fell-down. If it wasn’t broken….
But changes, or rather progression was afoot.
A changing programming landscape for the tech industry
It wasn’t just hardware which was evolving – Java wasn’t the only kid on the block as other open programming languages, such as PHP, came into much greater use than they previously had.
PHP was not quite a business-used developer language yet – with ‘yet’ being the key word here. PHP 4, powered by the Zend Engine 1.0, was released in 2000 followed by PHP 5 (powered by the new Zend Engine II) in July 2004.
PHP 5 included new features such as improved support for object-oriented programming, the PHP Data Objects (PDO) extension (which defines a lightweight and consistent interface for accessing databases), and numerous performance enhancements.
PHP was becoming more powerful, more versatile and for people like Jon and Darren, more useable.
Programming language opens the server door
The key importance about the greater use of Java and PHP and the move to open-source programming languages was that they could run on many different and cheaper servers, more so than the proprietary RPG language on the IBM AS/400.
From a business technology perspective, this was huge.
Merisis – launched in 2000
Jon and Darren started the foundations of Merisis in 1998 whilst working at GeoLogistics [see previous article], then in 2000 the business was formally launched from Jon’s dining room. There was officially a new entrant to the tech industry.
The company strategy was quite simple: Adapt & Adjust. Jon and Darren knew from experience that many large organisations were restricted by disparate legacy systems. This proved to be a two-sided challenge as aging IT legacy systems were a threat to progress, and disparate systems a threat to productivity – however complete replacement was a threat to business as usual and came with a large financial investment. What could businesses do?
Recognising that many businesses would be slow or restricted to wholesale technology changes, Merisis continued working with IBM AS/400 but developed their own product, Freestyle-400 – a lightweight alternative to IBM’s WebSphere.
Merisis therefore made life simpler – offering customers solutions with the ability to program the AS/400, to adapt and grow with Freestyle-400 and offer a completely new approach to a Java based solution. This was faster and a more cost-effective way forward, demonstrating not just the agility of tech companies such as Merisis, but also of the changing industry too.
Some of their first larger projects included:
• Budget Insurance Group – their first online car insurance quotation system which would then lead to home and caravan insurance, then ultimately the comparethemarket brand.
• Glenmorangie supplier portal – to view requirements for raw materials.
• UECC (United European Car Carriers – part of the NYK Group). Test project in Turkey leading to a long-term relationship
• A first mobile App! (for a logistics customer to track shipments on a PDA)
The benchmark is set for Merisis
This mindset and foundation of clients and projects really set Merisis up for what they were to become today. Not just content with churning out projects at pace for the sake of it, Jon and Darren have always understood the technological landscape which their customers face, and the challenges it creates for them. Understanding the benefits and challenges of the workings of IBM systems is an example of this.
Knowing that technology evolves, but also doesn’t always start from a clean slate, is also central to the relationships Jon and Darren fostered in those early days.
However, as we all know, the tech industry just keeps on changing.
In Part 3 we will come up to date with Merisis with more Apps, more logistics and more problem solving.
- 1. Credit: E Gammie, Concorde at Baginton Concorde performing a low-level wheels down flypast at a Baginton air show. Concorde_at_Baginton_-_geograph.org.uk_-_156846.jpg ↩︎
- 2. The PHP elePHPant; Credit: Vincent Pontier – http://www.elroubio.net/elephpant_download.php http://php.net/elephpant.php ↩︎
25 years in the Tech industry, Part 1.
We’ve recently been reflecting on what we’ve achieved at Merisis in the tech industry – from our early days when tech was just coming out of the back rooms of businesses to 2025 where tech is not only standard – it’s an expectation too.
A lot happens over the course of 25-plus years and we’ve welcomed each year with passion, enthusiasm, ideas and dedication. So, for the sake of bringing to the table some observations and lessons learned (as well as plenty of nostalgia too), here’s Part 1 of “Merisis – 25 years in the tech industry.”
How well do you recall the 90’s? It seems so close, however 1990 is now 35 years ago. Let’s briefly set the scene…
The turn of the new decade saw huge cultural revival as well as political change. We experienced the rise of Britpop, dance and rave scenes and later came the rise of Tony Blair’s Labour. The economy shifted from manufacturing to service-led and the UK and France physically connected with the Euro-Tunnel. In sport, Frank Bruno won the WBC heavyweight championship title in the mid-90’s and Britain’s most expensive footballing transfer cost just £5m. (Chris Sutton, Norwich to Blackburn).
From a business perspective, computers were available (with home-computers being available in the 1980’s), but pen and paper still very prevalent and fax machines were still used. Although we knew greater use of technology was ideal, the reality of this in the everyday workplace was perhaps a little more sobering. Computers were large, bulky, slow and expensive.
Change however, is constant: The 90’s is seen as the decade where the rise of mobile phones and the World Wide Web really kicked into gear. The ‘Browser Wars’ saw AOL discs delivered with your Sunday papers at home, and we had the choice of Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator. Yahoo was one of the very first search engines, soon followed by the likes of Altavista and a startup called Google. A Blackberry device represented (in our opinion) an effective but clunky communication tool – as did the Nokia 9000 Communicator and as for the world of programming, COBOL was being superseded by the new kid on the block, Java.
Tech advances quickly and standard industry interfaces, such as MS Windows, made computers less of a ‘dark art’ and increasingly lower costs of CPUs started to make computers more cost-effective investment for businesses and how they operated.
However, we weren’t without restrictions in this new age. The consumer web was a great step in opening a world of information, but broadband was yet to take hold in a way we recognise now. Dial-up access was slow and costly, and the bandwidth was narrow. Webpages were basic and needed to be; anything too large would cause a time-out and the painful process of loading a page would start again. And in terms of how pages looked and were used – this was considered as pages were built. Job roles with ‘UX’ or ‘UI’ certainly weren’t commonplace.
But we still moved forward.
At this time, computers were used widely, especially in large organisations where IT systems and servers were required – however they needed a good amount of technical know-how to use. Midrange servers from IBM, DEC and HP provided the backbone of the early IT systems. This was the time of IBM AS/400 system – and a mantra we often heard was;
“If you were in business, you needed IBM.”
This alone represents the stronghold which IBM had on business technology at the time but of course, nothing lasts forever.
Founding Merisis
This brings us to Merisis, or rather the foundations of the business. Founders Darren Magson and Jon Tyler were to meet in the later 90’s – Darren having worked for renowned freight-forwarder LEP International and then GeoLogistics, Jon joining GeoLogistics from specialist IT logistics software company CSI in 1998/99. Both experiences gave them the foundations in information technology and how, when applied correctly, it could be used to great effect.
Darren recalls one of the first internet projects at this time – a browser-based cargo tracking system. This seems commonplace now, but remember – this is well over 20 years ago. The system in question was manually event-driven (departure/at airport or quayside, loaded, sailed or departed, arrived) and included a portal to open this information to their customers. The last fact alone demonstrates the change in the use of technology, and how it was becoming more customer focussed and part of more aspects of our lives. It also represents the type of work which was to become the backbone of Merisis – technology for Darren and Jon wasn’t about showing off different programming techniques or design styles, but was firmly rooted in creating the best solution to resolve a problem in the best way.
The growth of the internet offered huge opportunities to how businesses operated, however legacy systems and complicated interfaces were clearly a barrier.
By the time Darren and Jon decided to create Merisis, tech really was in growth. Both Jon and Darren saw the opportunity within technology and had a shared ideology. The growth of the internet offered huge opportunities to how businesses operated, however legacy systems and complicated interfaces were clearly a barrier. They also saw how technology could make a huge impact on the logistics sector – where not only recording and capturing information was important – but also sharing this intelligently could bring efficiencies on a global scale.
By the end of the 90’s, the combination of consumers and tech was becoming more commonplace. The conditions of price, usability and purpose were all favourable and the more consumers had access to, the more they not only wanted, but expected to. Mobile phones, text messages, DVD’s, MP3 – we were truly in a digital world.
In Part 2 we will go into the early 2000’s where Merisis start to make their mark in the logistics industry as well as first steps into the world of Mobile Apps.
