IBM have thousands of Business Partners around the World. This year VALELink 2000 were recognised as an Advanced Business Partner for their achievements in the employment of IBM products.

However there was more to come. Each year IBM considers products from their Worldwide Business Partners and nominates a small number as Beacon Award finalists in a variety of categories.

This is like being nominated for the Oscars but the competition is even fiercer.

Our nomination was based on achieving the equivalent of an Enterprise system for sales and servicing companies but on smaller more economic hardware, from IBM, running on their Unidata RDBMS and on the Linux Operating System to run mission critical functions.

We are delighted to report that we were nominated as finalists, the first Unidata partner in the UK to achieve this status.

In recognition Andy Birch and Nigel Hillier, co-founders, visited Los Angeles to attend the presentation ceremonies which are held in Kodak Theatre, the same place where the Oscars are presented.

Mention must also be made of Alto US, an Office Equipment company based in Atlanta because the proof of the effectiveness of our solution is to be found running their operations.

So now it is not just the larger sales and servicing companies that can employ the comprehensive system facilities provided by VALELink 2000. Even relatively small dealers can enjoy fully integrated systems for a few hundred pounds a month.

Our business was born in February 1988.

Whilst the business was not born in a manger its original premises were pretty modest to say the least in a little white building, where we occupied just 2 rooms. It was next to a pub, the White Blackbird on the London Road in Loudwater. The pub is long gone but the little white building still exists.

Our first customers were not from the industry that we came to serve but specialists in solar energy - Intersolar and Solapak, also based in Wycombe. They needed a highly integrated system to run their manufacturing and distribution and by purchasing the source code to a manufacturing system we were able to modify it to meet their needs, closely.

Whilst serving that customer we started to write our Application Manager which was a very sophisticated product that enabled us to develop our software very effectively. It generated programme code, including integration, from simple definitions, such as a list of fields, what they were to do and where they would be linked.

We completed the specification of what our sales and servicing company software would do by the end of March and we were installing and implementing the first modules by July 1988. The first customer for this software was an old family business called Peters and based in Hove. They were a Konica Dealer.

Over the next few years we added customers at the rate of one per month. We also provided consultancy and integration services and customers who employed these included Ricoh UK and Konica. Customers of ours included Konica Mercian, Gestetner UK, Rex Rotary, Photostatic and TOPS.

In 1990 we moved to offices in Princess Risborough.

In the early 90's when this country was being ravaged financially we aimed to win export business to compensate for the state of the UK market. We were the solution of choice for Xerox Developing Markets, beating other contenders who included Astea and Tesseract, and in 1993 we commenced our first installations in Turkey, Hungary and Morocco.

At this stage we moved to offices in Marlow, opposite the station.

Other Xerox installations followed in Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Saudi Arabia, Kenya, Kuwait, Russia, Ukraine, Czech Republic, Poland, Slovenia, Cote d'Ivoire, Nigeria, Pakistan, Oman and Bahrain but not in this order.

Many of our customers were substantial conglomerates in their own countries and this served to hone our integration skills as we linked to systems such as Oracle, SAP, SUN and many local software solutions.

Our last foreign implementations were in the USA and Egypt but then nine eleven dealt a blow to our business.

In the aftermath that was caused we handed the Account Management of our Xerox customers to an appointed VAR, XStream Software and we concentrated, again, on the UK and USA.

By the end of the 90's we had invented our own integration middleware, VALELink, particularly for mobile systems and changed our name to reflect this.

We won business for this middleware adding customers such as Bristol City Council, Forest of Dean District Council and manufacturers of ruggedised PC's, Itronix.

We also carried out our most ambitious integration project when we brought together onto our VALE Software diverse businesses acquired by the substantial Danka company. This included replacing Kodak and Infotec's (Oracle) systems and others provided by Commonsense Business Systems and Zaffire. We delivered the business on time, the only software house to do this, and get users off the Kodak systems, in particular, thus avoiding penalty clauses for our client.

Most recently our offerings include Client Server applications and specialists modules that can be connected to other solutions. We are an advanced IBM Business Partner, a Microsoft Partner and we have added Access Accounting Software to our offerings.

The business is still run by two of the original founders, Andy Birch and Nigel Hillier and we look forward to our 30th Birthday.