25 years ViCon – How it all began …

A quarter of a century is long, but goes by amazingly fast. In December, ViCon celebrates its anniversary and at this point we would like to look back on "25 years of ViCon" with a five-part series.

Let's start with the first five years in part one:

25 years ViCon – How it all began …

Shortly before Christmas in December 1998, Stefan Wolter founded ViCon GmbH as a software and consulting company, initially as a one-man business. The first contracts for individual software solutions were initiated from the living room at home. Quickly the first companions joined and in the middle of 1999 we were already a good half dozen in the ViCon team – in our own small office, the living room was used normally again.

The range of services now also extended to QM consulting with IT support, our specialty was the simplest possible visual representation of complicated processes. Our company name, which is composed of "Visualized Consulting", still fits this today.
Where the customer's shoe pinched was quickly recognized: Our own process management software was needed, simpler than other solutions, affordable and understandable for everyone.

And so it came to pass: At the turn of the millennium, "ViFlow 2000" saw the light of day. Those who have been with us for a long time will perhaps remember the slogan "Vizualize your Flow of Business", which adorned the packaging in the early years and is responsible for the name. The program interface was rather rudimentary with a lot of white space, but thanks to the Visio base and database, processes could already be modeled, evaluated and displayed as a WebModel.

Finally we were able to accompany our projects with suitable software, all customer and standard requirements were directly integrated into the further development of ViFlow.

On it went. Greatly improved, with more functions and based on the brand new Visio, the second generation, ViFlow 2002, was launched at the end of 2002. The first trade fair appearances followed, ViCon partners were added and the customer base grew – just like the ViCon team.

This brings us almost to the end of the first five, for us very exciting years. The fifth birthday – in the meantime we had a good 1,500 customers – had to be celebrated and so we travelled for a few days in the snow in December 2003. We looked back, laughed a lot, celebrated and skied a bit ... and of course we were all very curious how the ViCon story would continue ...

(to be continued)