Home / About Us

OUR STORY

We are a digital agency with multiple types of services available to our clients. We are a virtually organized company and work in both business and technology domains to bring success to our customers. Our engagements start with business problems (such as "I feel my company is not selling as much as we could online") and grow into technology solutions that yield the results needed. Our capabilities arise from our long history and unique journey, detailed below.

In 1993, a strange new term was circulating in the media; the "information superhighway". Our original founders, including Duane Nickull and Michael Palethorpe, immediately understood the profound nature of the changes our world would undergo once the DARPA-era networks became open to commerce and immediately set out to create a company to help businesses transition. They were met with skepticism until their first clients experienced financial success and issued glowing endorsements. The success started them on a journey they could not comprehend at the time.

By 1995, we were inundated with new clients who were curious about this new way of selling and connecting with their customers. The first iteration of the company, Walkabout Websites, ran out of the garage in Coquitlam, BC. The same year, the founders stumbled across key pieces of new technology enabling data to be portable on the web, namely the eXtensible Markup Language (XML) and XSLT for transformations. Realizing the significance of these technologies, to enable global data to travel and be consumed anywhere, the company pursued a strategy of rapid expansion and venture capital funding. As a result, XML Global Technologies was born in 1996. The company would later become publicly traded in the United States.

By 1997, the mainstream press started becoming aware of XML technologies and both media and analysts started reaching out to our founder for interviews and advice on XML. At the time, we ran xslt.com and participated in numerous discussion groups about the future of these technologies. As the technologies became more mainstream, so did the company.

By 1998, a new global effort was established by the United Nations and OASIS to bring these technologies to the world and help transition older companies off of the Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) standard and migrate away from Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) towards the internet. This effort was called the Electronic Business eXtensible Markup Language or ebXML, a lingua franca for business on the internet. We participated and by the end of the first meetings in San Jose, CA became contributors and editors of the Technical Architecture Working Group. This group produced the first drafts of what became modern B2B Ecommerce. Mr. Nickull eventually became a Co-chair of the Technical Architecture Group and later was elected as a Co-chair of the United Nations Centre for Facilitation of Commerce and Trade (UN/CEFACT), working part time in Genève, Switzerland within the Palace du Nations.

By 1999, a group of companies including Microsoft and IBM began working through the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), on a parallel technology stack under the moniker “Web Services”. The effort was distinguished as a pure XML B2B play while ebXML still embraced EDI. Mr. Nickull began to work on the W3G Web Services Architecture and is credited at the bottom of the document at https://www.w3.org/TR/ws-arch/ .

From 1998 to 2003, both groups produced numerous specifications and recommendations. During the dot-com economic slump of 2001-2003, XML Global Technologies became the target of acquisition, selling it's assets to Xenos Group in Eastern Canada. Our founders licensed back key pieces of technology on a non-exclusive basis and started a new company named Yellow Dragon Software. They key licensing agreement called for the founders of Yellow Dragon to maintain the technology and share revenue and upgrades back to both XML Global and Xenos.

By the fall of 2003, Yellow Dragon had already been successfully attracting new customers for the techologies and had a sales pipeline of over $1.5 million after only six months in business. Adobe Systems, a tech giant from San Jose, CA, acquired Yellow Dragon and all of it's IP rights and key personnel on November, 2003.

For the next eight years, the founders worked at Adobe as global ambassadors fo various technologies, travelling the world and developing new patents and technology ideas. In late 2011, Adobe decided to shed the Flex/Flash ecosystem and their enterprise business unit which lead to the founders parting ways. Over the next 8 years, we worked on various projects including teaching Neo4J Graph Database courses, running user groups and developing new ways to deploy that technology. Our core strengths grew as we continued to build upon the technical and business knowledge in our possession.

The most pivotal intellectual property owned by us is a new development process born as a hybrid approach using pieces of Agile, the Rose Unified Process (a UML modeling process), RACI/DACI and more. After working with various clients on multitudes of projects, the fate of many projects seemed to fall into one of two camps - either a success, yet expensive process, due to the time and energy spent to properly collect and document the business domain objectives as completely as possible, or a lesser success, due to a rush to develop a technological solution to a business problem that was not fully understood. While the latter took less time and expense, the results were generally sub optimal.

Today we offer a state of the art approach to managing technology projects. Most clients do not place a large emphasis on understanding the complete software development process, which is understandable as they should be primarily concerned with operating their businesses. We provide a series of free tutorials and white papers to help guide others through the process and understand the importance of considering business as the primary driver of technology adoption. Our processes allow clients to make much more informed choices on how to move forward and what to expect during the process. Once we sign a new client, we work diligently to learn the necessary business domain knowledge, document it using our Business and Domain Analysis System Software (BaDASS), and present each step incrementally back to the client. Upon successful sign off of each iteration, we complete the programs of work and deliver results clients appreciate.

The results speak for themselves. Check out our customer testimonials (below) or view the list of previous projects we have worked upon. Also be sure to check out our glowing endorsements on LinkedIn. If you have a business problem, contact us today to find out how technology might solve your problem and grow your business.

After all, this is what we do and what we're good at!