This year marks Intellect’s 20th year in business. We have come a long way since our early days as a small three-person operation here in Southern California. Two decades after our founding, we are proud to have been recognized by Gartner as a top eQMS provider and to have earned a spot in G2’s “leader” quadrant. Intellect is on an upward trajectory, thanks to our great team of committed employees, innovative partners, and loyal customers.
Intellect started out around the time that the dot-com bubble was reaching its peak. The Y2K crisis had come and gone with little fanfare, and Bush vs. Gore was the political event of the season. AOL was merging with Time-Warner, and Gladiator was a hit at the box office.
Our three founders set out to develop software that could make life less complicated for product engineers and manufacturing companies. They showed up at a UCLA business plan competition with a pile of engineering reference manuals, demonstrating that their product could replace all that complexity by making information readily available and searchable for engineers. The founders decided to call the company “Interneer”.
With the help of some angel investors and a lot of hard work, Interneer successfully landed some big-name clients, including AECOM, Boeing, Bose, and Harman International. As the company worked with some of those early customers, we learned more about their needs; many of them struggled to capture the institutional knowledge that their engineers were carrying around inside their heads. They needed better systems for documenting and managing their business processes, and we adapted our company and our product to meet those needs.
It was almost 10 years before we moved into our own office, with a lot of ups and downs along the way. By 2009, the company had shifted its focus to BPM, and our growth took off. By 2014 we were experiencing 40% year-over-year growth, and we decided to narrow our focus to eQMS, where we felt our product offered especially strong value. We re-branded the company under its current name, and articulated our mission with a new clarity: At Intellect, we empower everyone to innovate.
That idea was part of our DNA from the early days, and it continues in our current work. Our passion is to bring flexible, adaptable processes to any organization, – to enable rapid innovation, without all the heavy lifting. That’s why Intellect has focused so heavily on the concept of “extreme configurability”. We saw a market that was split between complex, big-iron software in the enterprise space and low-end options that lacked the necessary sophistication and flexibility to get the job done.
Intellect found a sweet spot right in the middle, offering the best of both worlds. Our software makes it easy for virtually anyone in the enterprise to develop forms, applications, and processes to suit their unique requirements, without the complexity and expense that accompanies most enterprise-grade software products.
Extreme configurability has been especially important since the arrival of COVID-19, as companies have scrambled to adapt to a world in which face-to-face interaction, on-site audits, and paper-based systems are no longer effective ways of getting the job done. Business agility has been a common theme this year across all industries, – not just in quality management, but throughout entire organizations. Agility has always been part of the Intellectual way of doing business, so our customers were already poised to adapt when this crisis first appeared on the scene.
We are proud of the community of customers, partners, and employees that have grown up around Intellect over the years. We strive to maintain a company culture that is focused on customer success, teamwork, proactive initiative, and fun. We are proud of the fact that over 40% of our employees have been with the company for more than five years, and many are approaching a decade or more with Intellect.
Our community of customers and partners, likewise, has been a tremendous asset. We held our first Innovate conference in 2012, and it’s been growing ever since. This year, in light of the COVID pandemic, we held our first virtual Innovate conference, featuring fourteen educational sessions delivered over two days. (If you missed Innovate 2020, you can watch those sessions on demand.)
As we look back at the past two decades, we would like to thank all of you who have been with us on this journey. We look forward to continuing to fulfill our mission, – empowering everyone to innovate.
