See Video History of metalayer

A NEW LAYER IS EMERGING

It all started when in mid 1999 Markus began to implement the first prototype on his laptop, at nights in the office, in hotel rooms while traveling, while spending days with the clients of his employer.

Three years ago, in the summer of 1999 Markus was in San Francisco for four months, analyzing the web portal market for his employer, Deloitte Consulting. As a Business Consultant, he focused on Information Technology assessment, strategies and implementations.

It was a hot summer for portals, which were supposed to become the daily workplace for the knowledge worker, integrating and personalizing all data sources and application he needed for his daily job. But what is a portal? An application? not really, as it is "basically doing nothing" - at least not in the sense of an application. In his analysis, Markus clearly understood, that there is a new type of software emerging, which didn't really belong to one of the classical three layers of software engineering - It didn't store data, nor run an application, nor was it only presentation of information. This new "metalayer", emerging between the application and the presentation layer, was processing meta data about available applications, data sources and about the user visiting the portal. This was the time when the very basic idea was developed and the decision made to start the company and the first prototypes were implemented.

NIGHTLY INCEPTION

When Markus came back to the Deloitte Swiss office, he met Niki, a fellow consultant in the Zurich office. The two spent during the next 6 months many nights together in the office or in Niki's basement, co-creating and co-developing the metalayer idea, while working at day time for the customers of Deloitte Consulting. It was the time, when communication, and collaboration were added to the idea and the prototypes based on a concept of communities. In this time, Markus and Niki generated a couple of test comties for Deloitte Consulting customers - and one of them for Eli Lilly was the first prototype to go live in November 1999.

Markus ended his employment at Deloitte in January 2000 in order to fully focus on metalayer. He was strongly convinced, that only a product focused strategy could provide long term success and not (as usual in these times) a focus on marketing. A first recruitment for technology people in Switzerland was not successful - Information Technology and especially "e-Business" were very hot. It was the time, when the New Economy reached the Zenith of attention all around the world. The technology people were all absorbed by banks in Y2K work and in the hot New Economy companies. So, Markus decided to go, where many technologically sound people were available.

SETTING THE TECHNOLOGY LAB

In April 2000, a young technology team in Pune-India started to build on and implement the visions of metalayer. Three consultants of an Indian software company and Markus started in a small office within an Indian chemical company. A first round of Interviews were done and a team of 11 software engineers were hired. The team launched and developed reopean.com, the first real hub for their first customer. And the code of the prototype was completely reworked and launched as the first product in June 2000 (see technology history).

In August 2000, metalayer AG, the Swiss company was founded and metalayer Software pvt ltd India became a subsidiary of metalayer AG. The set up of metalayer was privately funded, mainly by the management, their families and friends who believed in the project. The idea was, to finance the initial set up and then to find a Venture Capitalist or bank partner who would finance the further development and expansion.

SURVIVING THE SHAKEOUT

In October 2000 metalayer started preparing its first financing round but at the end of 2000, the crash of the dot com made the market for start up financing so bleak, that it was difficult to negotiate a good financing model. Hoping the market would improve, metalayer postponed the first round, but continued the growth with two recruitments in October 2000 and January 2001, bringing its technology center to a staff of almost 30 employees, mainly software engineers. However, 2001 turned into the year of the large shakeout of software companies and it was impossible to get any funding for a young start-up. With it's values of transparency and knowledge creation metalayer however has maintained a steady grown graph in the most difficult of times.

GROWTH

In February 2001 we got our last private investment - And we realized, that we could only survive, if we covered our costs by revenue. 2001 became a tough year for metalayer of cost cutting to a minimum and constant revenue grow. It was only by end of the year, negotiating a new contract with our main customer and getting some more assignments which made us sustain in the market and allowed us to continue our expansion. In march 2002, metalayer again recruited software professionals and marketing professionals were recruited in July. Constant consolidation of employees and knowledge has infused strength and market value, to the extent that metalayer proudly is an 98% Intangibles and 2% Tangibles model knowledge organization. This is not just a theoretical proposition but based upon financial facts.

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