Wednesday 30th September

This week is a pretty sad week if truth be told. If I cast my mind back to March 1998, I was having a very nice lunch while listening to two ICC people (Chris Mason and Angela Burdett) telling an audience at Hampton Court how fantastic Juniper Web was / would be. At the time I was pretty amazed at the speed and ability of the product (the dial up internet I had from Netscape was rubbish!). I know a fair bit more about demonstrations and how to ‘manage’ them to your advantage now but, at the time, I thought it was magic!

Similarly 1999 (Ian Goodenough, XD), 2001 (Terry Dawson, Plum), and 2003 (Matthew Debbage, Aquila) were all great occasions when ICC launched a new product into the marketplace . (I note, this is a pretty impressive list of the great and good in Business & Credit Information and I have learnt much from all of them).

Our legacy products were innovative and have proved invaluable to thousands of credit managers, information professionals and knowledge managers over the years (plus countless other 'job functions' over their lifetime).

I am sure many of you will recall how hard copy documents would get lost in a post room somewhere, or our famous juggler (who you watched for ages as the image loaded up), or credit reports before they had tailored scoring and always live archiving. And, dare I even mention the f word!!! A bit like CD’s, I remember a time when people said you will never be able to replace micro fiche... No, Agfa printers smelt bad and mainly just burnt paper.

But this week all these products were 'sunsetted' as we, and our clients, face the future on the services of our new platform. And so the world keeps turning. Information and credit professionals demands get more (and sometimes less) sophisticated and a new set of tools are required to do the job efficiently and effectively.

So I will raise a glass to our legacy products collectively (and individually), I will rose tint my spectacles (If I recall many of these products did break sometimes... in the early years...) and have a small tear in my eye. I will also bask in the splendour of actually genuinely being able to turn off a product (this is not as simple as it seems believe me).

Then I will get back to reality, remember that ICC's new services are much faster, fault tolerant, flexible and user friendly. And the cold harsh reality that things change and will always need to move forward. As the strapline says “the future is bright... the future is orange” (or is it yellow & blue)?

So farewell fond friends. Those that have used you will be sad at your passing into internet history. But are we all better off for you existing in the first place? You betcha by golly we are!

Now I am off to do the last few things before CAct day. See you on the other side....

(PS - I would love to know how much that Companies House advert cost with real curtains that is currently in Waterloo station...is that what the late filing penalty fines are for)?