Inventive Designers
| Private company | |
| Industry | Software |
| Headquarters | Antwerp |
Number of employees | 38 (November 2014) |
| Website | http://www.inventivedesigners.com |
Inventive Designers is a privately owned software development company, based in Antwerp, Belgium. The company was founded in 1994 by Guy Dehond and Patrick Morren.
Guy Dehond was one of the beta testers of the AS/400 (codenamed "Silverlake") at IBM. Dehond and Morren had worked with this system for years, and their first products were for the AS/400. Later they started to design products for cross-platform environments. Today, the company specializes in software solutions for customer communications management in the public, financial, telecommunications, utility, insurance and healthcare industry, in over 30 countries.
In 2010 the company received a CIOnet Innovation Award [1]
The company participates in the AFP Consortium [2] and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). At the W3C, Inventive Designers was active in the XSL Working Group, and Chief Technical Officer Klaas Bals was the editor of XSL Requirements 2.0 [3] document. Currently, the company plays an active role in W3C's Forms Working Group.[4]
At the end of 2012 the second generation took over the company: Guy Dehond handed over the company to his daughter Joke Dehond and his son-in-law Klaas Bals. They successfully retained the identity and the DNA of the company, but have put their own accents.
In April 2014 Scriptura Engage was named Gartner Cool Vendor 2014 in Printing and Imaging by Gartner.
On January 5, 2015 Joke Dehond was named ICT Woman of the Year 2015.
Company timeline
| 1994 | Inventive Designers BVBA founded by Guy Dehond and Patrick Morren in Belgium |
|---|---|
| 1996 | Alteration of Inventive Designers BVBA into Inventive Designers NV (comparable to limited liability company) |
| 1998 | Introduction of EverGreen/400 to allow 5250 non-programmable workstations to act as a full e-mail capable terminal |
| 1998 | Worldwide distribution of EverGreen/400 by IBM |
| 1999 | Introduction of DTM for AS/400 or DTM for iSeries, capable of converting OfficeVision documents to XML |
| 1999 | Inventive Designers' Litrik De Roy is co-author of the IBM Redbook: How to Replace OfficeVision/400 in Your Applications[5] |
| 2000 | Move to new offices |
| 2002 | Worldwide distribution of DTM for iSeries by Lotus Software |
| 2002 | DTM nominated as Apex Award Finalist by iSeries News Magazine |
| 2002 | Introduction of Scriptura XBOS, one of the first what-you-see-is-what-you-get XSL editors |
| 2003 | The company receives a Gazelle Certificate from Trends Magazine, one of the leading business magazines in Belgium, in the category 'Fast Growing Small Businesses' |
| 2003 | The company receives the SpringBOK award for fastest growing and most creative enterprise in the Antwerp region |
| 2003 | 'Best Performer' for the province of Antwerp at the yearly Flemish export price 'Lion of the export' |
| 2004 | Release of Scriptura Designer and Scriptura Engine, first steps towards a document composition tool |
| 2004 | IBM's Watson Research Group invites Inventive Designers to join the XSL Working Group of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) |
| 2005 | Winner of the 'Platinum European Seal of Excellence in Multimedia' at the yearly CeBIT Convention in Hannover, Germany |
| 2005 | The company receives a Gazelle Certificate from Trends Magazine, one of the leading business magazines in Belgium, in the category 'Fast Growing Medium Businesses' |
| 2005 | Release of Scriptura XSL Business Output Suite, a platform to compose templates and generate multi-channel output. Introducing electronic forms. |
| 2006 | Inventive Designers receives an Honorable Mention at the 'Innovator of the Year' award ceremony at the XPlor International Conference in Miami |
| 2006 | The company joins the AFP Consortium |
| 2006 | Director Joke Dehond receives XPlor's Electronic Document Professional[6] certification |
| 2006 | The company wins the AIIM Best Practice Award for Banking and Financial Services at the yearly AIIM Conference in Philadelphia |
| 2007 | The 'ICT Innovation Award' of Banking and Finance Magazine is awarded to Inventive Designers |
| 2007 | Release of the Scriptura Post-Processor, enabling grouping, bundling, sorting ... |
| 2009 | Release of IntelliStamp (patent pending), a hybrid signature to secure electronic and paper documents |
| 2009 | Inventive Designers is selected for the Benelux short list of Logica's 'Global Innovation Venture Program' contest |
| 2009 | Release of Scriptura Document Flow, a what-you-see-if-what-you-get interface to design and execute document flows. Replaces the Scriptura Post-Processor |
| 2009 | Partnership with Xerox for Belgium and Luxemburg |
| 2010 | Founder Guy Dehond receives the 2010 CIOnet Innovation Award |
| 2010 | Inventive Designers named as one of nine ambitious companies by Deloitte's Technology Fast50 in Belgium |
| 2010 | Scriptura’s newest version gets a new name: Scriptura Engage |
| 2011 | IntelliStamp project at IAK wins DCM award [7] |
| 2012 | Mechelen and Antwerp first cities worldwide to use IntelliStamp |
| 2012 | IntelliStamp Mechelen wins ‘e-counter of the future’, ‘Usability Award 2012’ and ‘eGov Award Best Project 2012’ and got nominated for the ‘eGov Award for Innovation’ |
| 2012 | IntelliStamp Antwerp laureate ‘Accenture Innovation Award 2012’ [8] |
| 2012 | In December Joke Dehond and Klaas Bals took over the company as co-CEOs |
| 2013 | The IntelliStamp Center now offers IntelliStamp as a cloud service |
| 2014 | In April Scriptura Engage is named [9] in Printing and Imaging by Gartner |
| 2014 | Scriptura Engage launches its own product website: https://www.scripturaengage.com [10] |
| 2014 | The Scriptura Engage Communication Center is released: a central communications hub for all customer correspondence |
| 2015 | DataNews[11] named Joke Dehond as ICT Woman of the Year 2015 |
| 2015 | Inventive Designers receives the Overall (2011-2015) Innovation DCM Award for its IntelliStamp project at IAK |
| 2015 | Inventive Designers sells IntelliStamp to Cipal, to focus on the internationalization of Scriptura Engage |
Products
DTM for iSeries or DTM for AS/400
In 1995 IBM purchased Lotus Software for $3.5 billion, primarily to acquire Lotus Notes and to establish a presence in the increasingly important client–server computing segment, which was making host-based products like IBM's OfficeVision obsolete. Guy Dehond and Patrick Morren decided to provide a solution to these customers that had millions of archived and active documents in OfficeVision. In 2000 they released DTM for AS/400, a native System i (AS/400) Data/Text Merge solution. It includes 5250 or Word based editing, creating modifiable merged documents, producing SCS and AFP color print streams, 5250 or Word based Fill forms. It is based on XML technology and allows the import of existing OV/400 RFT/FFT documents. IBM discontinued support of OfficeVision as of October 6, 2003.
Scriptura Engage
Scriptura started in 2001 as one of the first software solution to actively use XSL-FO, which (at that time) was still a W3C recommendation and not a standard yet. The release of the Scriptura Designer in 2001 allowed its users to create XSL-FO templates, based on XML input data. Rather than having to write XSL-FO code, the Scriptura Designer was a WYSIWYG design tool that allowed users to design a template and export it as an XSL-FO template.
In 2003, the Scriptura Server was released and allowed use of XSL-FO templates from the Scriptura Designer as input format to create output in Portable Document Format (PDF). There were separate components for batch and online processing. At that time, Inventive Designers was invited by IBM's Watson Research Laboratories to join the W3C XSL Working Group. New output formats were added over the years, including AFP, PDF/A, TIFF, RTF, PostScript and PCL. In 2005, Scriptura E-Forms was released, to allow users to design and process electronic forms, based on W3C's XForms standard.
Scriptura is based on the separation of content and layout, and the templates that are created with the Scriptura Designer were independent of the final output format. It was the Scriptura Server that did the transformation from XSL-FO into a final output format. That way, a single template could be used for every output format. Support for multichannel output was implemented and customers started asking for post-processing operations like bundling, sorting and grouping. This resulted in the release of the Scriptura Bundler component (2005), which later evolved into the Scriptura PostProcessor (2007).
The PostProcessor was a Java API, so additional programming was needed to implement it. Also, there was a need for better pluggability and a need to cover the entire document process. And since Scriptura wanted to offer the opportunity to be used by non-IT users, a graphical interface was needed. In 2008, the Scriptura DocumentFlow was released, a graphical interface that enabled users to design the whole document process, from data retrieval to output delivery.
In October 2010 the newest version of Scriptura was released with a new name, Scriptura Engage, to reflect the new architecture and technical strategy, aimed at allowing organisations to engage their stakeholders with multichannel communication.
Scriptura Engage Interactive Document Assembly was released in 2013. Scriptura Engage Interactive Document Assembly offers interactive document composition and assembly, allowing users to interactively compose documents tailored to the customers needs.
With its new version 8.0, the Scriptura Engage platform includes a new component called Scriptura Engage Communication Center. The objective of the communication center is to act as a central communications hub for customer correspondence. It is a management platform for executing complex multichannel communication strategies in a standardized manner and can be configured, extended, or customized to meet strategic communication objectives of the organizations.
IntelliStamp
IntelliStamp was introduced by the company in 2009.[12] It is a hybrid electronic signature product that is used to protect both electronic documents and their paper printouts.[13][14] It is used by organizations and governments.[15] The technology was one the short list of Logica's Global Innovation Venture Program in 2009 for Belgium, Netherlands, Luxemburg and Germany.[16] IntelliStamp has received multiple awards[17][8][7] since its first release.
Since 2013 IntelliStamp is offered as a cloud service on the IntelliStamp Center. This is done either directly or through your home provider, because the IntelliStamp Center is an independent, cross-sector initiative supported by the various partners in the ICT market.
In 2015 Inventive Designers sold the IntelliStamp software to Cipal. The sale only includes the technology behind IntelliStamp. With this sales Inventive Designers can now concentrate more on the international growth of its customer communications platform Scriptura Engage.
References
- ↑ "CIOnet Awards voor Guy Dehond en Kurt De Ruwe (CIOnet Awards for Guy Dehond and Kurt De Ruwe)" (in Dutch). 17 November 2010.
- ↑ Inventive Designers joins AFP Consortium
- ↑ XSL Requirements 2.0
- ↑ Forms Working Group
- ↑ "IBM Redbooks - How to Replace OfficeVision/400 in Your Applications: Looking at Domino for AS/400 and AS/400 Alternatives". ibm.com.
- ↑ Xplor EDP Class of 2005
- 1 2 YouTube. youtube.com.
- 1 2 "Innovation Awards - De prijs voor vernieuwing!". innovationawards.be.
- ↑ "Inventive Designers named as Cool Vendor by Gartner". Scriptura Engage.
- ↑ "Scriptura Engage". Scriptura Engage.
- ↑ "Technologie - DataNews - Knack.be". knack.be.
- ↑ The Gilbane Report
- ↑ "IntelliStamp". Inventive Designers.
- ↑ "Inventive Designers". Innovatiecentrum Antwerpen.
- ↑ Leading the way: true e-services for citizens
- ↑ "Logica presents selection of the most Innovative Technologie of 2009". Dutch Cowboys.
- ↑ eGov Awards 2012