The latest news from Meantime IT

Back in the late nineties when Meantime was just a ‘hobby company’, our first proper project was an e-commerce site for The Roofbox Company. This would have been in 1997, when we had no recourse to an online relational database and, if I recall correctly, did everything with perl scrips and cgi-bins!

Roll forward to 2004 and we became what you might call a proper company, with an office and employees. Steve Parker, now our Technical Director, was the first developer to come on-board and the first project he worked on was overhauling some websites belonging to a Turkish Property Developer. While he was doing that, I was working with their business development manager, Mark, to devise a management system for all of their clients and properties. Further down the line we did a whole new piece of work so that these property owners could rent out their properties via the web. It was our first bookings system.

And somehow, over the years that followed, we seemed to attract projects that required some element of booking, without ever marketing ourselves in that space. There was the ID Centre booking system for BAA (as it was back then), a sports website launched to coincide with the Olympics that enabled teams to book matches in leagues, a system to enable people to book elements of training in a particular sequence over a period of time, and a system, which we still manage, which enables non-operational staff at Heathrow Airport to book roles tailored to their skills during incidents at the airport. And more…

… including one for travellers to book VIP services at Dublin Airport (or ‘daa’). And over the last year, daa has come to us with two further requirements: one is a system to enable companies to buy advertising space and the other is to allow taxis and chauffeurs to purchase their annual permit online. In some respects, these might not obviously be described as booking systems but they both follow a pattern of limited resources that need to be purchased by eligible candidates with some processing required around invoicing. Indeed, for the Advertising system, the extract to the general ledger was a project in itself!

Of course, there’s a lot more to what we can do than bookings systems. Over the last sixteen years we’ve worked with companies in all sorts of industries and had to become knowledgeable in everything from conveyancing to waterproof sealants. In the last few weeks I’ve had to learn what FMCG stands for (it’s ‘fast-moving consumer goods’) and talked to a large, international company about feeding into their ‘data lake’. But for me and the rest of the team at Meantime, that’s what keeps it interesting.