2019 Vintage Esker from a Veteran Eskerian

Wynne — Fri, 18 Jan 2019 14:31:38 +0000

When I tell people I have worked at Esker for over 24 years they usually say “The same company for 24 years?”. My usual response is “No, I have worked at a company called ‘Esker’ for that time, most definitely not the same company it was when I joined in 1995”. One of the major benefits of my time at Esker is that I had to visit the European headquarters, based in Lyon, nestled between two of my favourite wine areas of Burgundy and the Rhone. These classic wines enjoy certain years, which produced outstanding wines, and this made me think that there were certain ‘vintage’ years in Esker’s past which I will share with you.

1995 – I join Esker, and a great year for French wines in general. 1995 Bordeaux is still keeping and drinking well (both red and white), and Champagne is also excellent from this vintage. During this year Esker released Tun v8.0 (the best Terminal Emulation software and TCP/IP utility suite around), and if you needed a copy it would be supplied on ten floppy disks! Microsoft had still yet to fully develop a TCP/IP stack (which could be provided with Tun TCP) and had just released Windows ’95!

1999 & 2000 – For Burgundy red make mine a 1999 vintage, but in Bordeaux 2000 proved to be one of the top vintages of the last 20 years. Esker had been busy extending Terminal emulation into the ‘Web’ and had acquired SmarTerm, but also was looking into delivering data and had a number of Fax Server products (Faxgate, LanFax, VSI-Fax, and Tun Fax).

2005 – Across the board French wines at their best and drinking exceptionally well now. Esker was now fully committed to document delivery technology and had developed the delivery of Mail, Fax documents with cloud-based solutions (Mail and Fax on Demand) as well as the ‘on premises’ solution ‘DeliveryWare’ making it a major world provider of fax services world-wide. Solutions were being delivered to Esker customers with the newly formed Professional Services division.

2009-2010 – Like the period 10 years earlier a brace of vintages producing wonderful French wines. Drink 2009 now, but if you have a classic 2010 then it will reward laying down for a few more years. Esker is now providing all the features and functionality of the ‘on premises’ solution of DeliveryWare in the cloud and providing document automation applications, order and invoice automation processing, in addition to document delivery. The Esker R&D team are looking at ‘Agile’ in order to manage software development and deliver solutions quicker and more efficiently to its customers.

2015 – Fantastic reds from Burgundy and Northern Rhone, but need to be kept for a few more years yet to fully appreciate them. Esker is now fully Agile with development and delivery of its solutions through its Professional Services division. This has enabled Esker to offer an updated version of its Esker on Demand cloud solutions based on flexible process technology. Acquisition of TermSync in the U.S. and CalvaEDI in France see Esker strengthen their application offering and document delivery services.

2019, and the Future. You never really know whether a vintage will be a classic until the first tastings the following year, so time will tell if 2019-2020 will produce another couple of years of exceptional wine. For Esker it looks like another classic year ahead, with the introduction of RPA (Robotic Process Automation) and AI (Artificial Intelligence) continues Esker’s development of smart document automation solutions.

Cheers, and here’s to Esker’s continued success!

Wynne

Wynne is Technical Services Director for Esker UK

Wynne – BLOG ESKER UK

2019 Vintage Esker from a Veteran Eskerian

Wynne