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In the last issue of Edition News we catalogued how Catalysts got started and how the lives of two of the original staff have progressed since they left. This time we are going to take a wander through the last 20 years from a company perspective, passing by some customers, some suppliers and some staff, but mainly focusing on the business itself, its locations, its products and its operations.
In the early 90s we were exclusively selling Folio Views both direct and via a slowly growing number of resellers. Views was a pre-Windows product that sold easily and hardly ever gave rise to technical support issues. Plenty of training masquerading as support but little ever went wrong. It was unique in that it was both an editing tool (and still is) and a retrieval tool. An infobase was highly compressed even though it included an index within the data file and the search was both intuitive and lightning fast. It became a very popular application. It was not expensive and if your organisation used Novell Netware then you had a free user application for everyone and only needed to buy the Builder.
The first applications of Views for publishing followed Folio Corporation's success with the legal and accounting markets in the US and its adaptation for the publishers supplying them. In the UK the market followed suit and we started building floppy disk-based publication products for Croner, swiftly followed by others. In this we were helped enormously by Folio's Exec VP Henry Heilesen. Henry was an early recruit to Folio, initially as a Consultant, following a very senior role with Lexis Nexis, and became a wonderful support and friend to Catalysts.
And then along came Windows (the timing may be a bit out of sync here but so is the author's memory) and the demand for a version of Views to run on it was big and insistent. Folio duly obliged and the need for Catalysts to have an active technical support operation grew apace. However, Views continued to gain wide acceptance and with it Catalysts grew steadily - eventually reaching 18 staff. Publications on floppy disk began to cede ground to CD-ROM and then came the move to the Internet and online publishing. There was some scepticism over how this would take off in the publishing market but inevitably it did, of course.
All of these developments came along with, it now seems in retrospect, alarming rapidity - new versions of software were being delivered regularly. Catalysts was having to learn and adopt new skills seemingly every day and sometimes we felt that we were lagging behind some of our customers.
Whilst we moved on, with Folio under its successive ownerships, from just Views to first SiteDirector, then LivePublish and finally NXT, so our customer base expanded and with it the range of what Catalysts was being asked to do. We increasingly added bespoke developments to the products we represented - multiple publication CDs with on-board access control, hosting online systems and adding statistics and access control modules. Those were and still are busy and exciting days.
Concurrent with all this were changes of personnel within the business. Whilst the core team has been pretty steady for the last 13 years, a number of people have come and gone in that period - all contributing much to our progress and we are grateful for their contributions. Not least to our investors and Board members. The initial backers of Phil Bacon and Nigel Phelps were steadfast in their support over a number of years and Sebastian Crawshaw became an investor and our Chairman after initially being a customer. He was followed as Chairman by Roy Key, an extremely experienced ex-Financial Director and accountant - a wonderfully supportive leader whose sudden death shook us all very deeply. Roy had seen us through some very tricky times with a rare sureness of touch. Roy was followed by Neil Kingon, introduced to us by Sebastian Crawshaw. It was a tough job for Neil Kingon, also an accountant, to follow Roy Key but he did a wonderful job - again seeing us through sticky patches with resolute support and guidance. Today our Chairmanship is in the more than capable hands of Ray Jackson. Ray is a very successful company director of a number of companies including one of Catalysts' partners Solcara, where he was the founding MD and is now Chairman. He is also on the Board of Access Intelligence Plc. Ray brings to Catalysts his extensive industry experience and an amazing contacts network.
Catalysts has benefited from the somewhat circular nature of the publishing industry with key people moving from company to company and taking us with them. We started working with Croner in 1993 and we are still there with Wolters Kluwer UK today - we feel privileged by such a relationship. Others with Lexis Nexis, Sweet & Maxwell, Ernst & Young, KPMG, BNAI and more have been almost as long and equally valuable. We are grateful to them all for their loyalty to us.
For much of the last 20 years Catalysts has focused almost entirely on one supplier - Folio Corporation - which successively has been transformed through ownership into Mead Data Central, Reed Elsevier, OpenMarket, NextPage, FAST, Microsoft and now Rocket Software. In the last year or so we have expanded our supplier relationships to include Solcara, KnowledgeTree, THINK Subscription, Vircosoft and most recently Capsys. These now enable us to offer a wider and deeper range of solutions to our customers - they have been supportive and cooperative and we enjoy working with them.
So, 20 years have passed as if in a moment. We salute all the people we have been involved with, customers, suppliers and staff - it's been a pleasure and an education working with you all. Thank you! |
