EPIX was formed in 1991, initially to provide employment for our founder, Stephen Earl. The assets of his previous employer’s software subsidiary were purchased: a construction purchasing system; a partly written accounting system; and a collection of hardware.
In 1987 Stephen was working as a buyer for a construction company and had written a purchasing program for use by himself and his assistant. This had increased their productivity by 50%. Initial marketing was therefore aimed at those in a similar role – with the tag line “Do you need half an assistant?”. This resonated with the market and Stephen was able to acquire several sales as a result.
Meanwhile, news of the new venture filtered through to the suppliers that the construction company had used. This resulted in EPIX securing orders from two reinforcement suppliers – to provide optimising software to assist them in cutting stock lengths into a range of sizes.
At the same time a former colleague started working at a large building maintenance company and approached Stephen to see if EPIX could write a system to help with their large volume of electrical inspections on council houses (“the paperwork is killing us”). The order was obtained and the first ‘maintenance system’ was born.
EPIX’s reputation for designing software for purchasing and building maintenance grew and, by the end of the decade, this was generating a substantial income. Hardware, wiring, installation and support orders frequently accompanied the initial software sale so, by the end of the decade, EPIX’s engineers were spending a substantial amount of time working on their customers’ sites. Building maintenance is typically made up of a large volume of small value orders and, in the 90s, usually a huge quantity of pre-carbonated tickets. Working on site and seeing the huge piles of paper in our customers’ offices, and the engineers queuing in the morning to pick up their tickets, caused us to think: “there must be a better way”. This prompted the discussions in 2000 that would lead to us developing mobile working.
Building maintenance was not the only focus on the company in the 90s. The accounts system was finished and installed in a test site – but then Windows became the vogue and the product became obsolete. Other systems fell by the wayside for the same reasons – but not always: in 1993 the company bought the assets of another software company and acquired, among other things, a solicitors’ time recording and billing system. By a happy coincidence, the boss of one of our building maintenance customers rang us the day that we collected the source code and asked: “Do you know anything about solicitors’ systems?” to which we were able to reply: “Funny you should say that, we bought one this morning!” It just so happened that his daughter was working at a large firm of solicitors and had been tasked with finding a system. We obtained the order, re-wrote our software and acquired a fair amount of business as a result, from this firm and others.
Looking back at the 90s it is clear that, to many of our customers, we were in effect their IT managers. This really reflected the nature of the IT world at the time. Within a few years we had virtually ceased to do these ‘add-ons’ as this role was increasingly being filled by in-house IT departments and / or specialist IT support contractors.
And there we have a summary of EPIX in the 1990s. The 2000s will be coming soon…!
