[midPoint] Blog: Preparing Evolveum’s Look

[Radovan Semancik]

Dear midPoint community,

Early summer 2011, ten years ago. We started midPoint project. We were 
preparing to set up a company to provide funding for midPoint 
development. We got the name, but there is much more than just a name 
needed to establish a company.
MidPoint project was up and running 
<https://evolveum.com/ten-years-of-midpoint/>, we got first release out 
<https://docs.evolveum.com/midpoint/release/1.7/> and we were already 
working on next one. We were all convinced that open source is the right 
way to go. Open source is, in theory, a perfect way to develop and 
distribute software. However, there are few practical obstacles, such as 
the annoying habits of the developers to eat and sleep. Someone has to 
pay the bills.

Our plan was to set up a new company to provide funds for the 
development. We have already decided about the name 
<https://evolveum.com/where-did-evolveum-come-from/>: Evolveum. That was 
all we had. We knew that identity management software is needed. We knew 
that most of existing commercial IDM products fail miserably. We even 
had the code, albeit it was hardly better than a prototype. We knew 
there is an opportunity. For a bunch of people living in a 
post-communist part of Europe this was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. 
However, we had no idea how to take advantage of that opportunity. We 
had no business plan, we had no marketing, we had no partners and there 
were only a very few potential customers within our reach.

Therefore we started to tackle the most important problem first: company 
logo. We did what all the reputable companies do, we used our limited 
funds to hire a graphic designer. The idea was to keep the “proper 
engineering” theme that got us our name 
<https://evolveum.com/where-did-evolveum-come-from/>. The designer was a 
weird character. He did not even want to talk to us directly. All 
communication was mediated by a friend. Yet, his work was good. After a 
couple of iterations we were getting close to what we wanted.

Evolveum 2011 logo prototype

This was the “proper 20th century engineering” or “Leonardo da Vinci” 
theme that I have envisioned. I loved the design. Keen marketing eye can 
probably spot all the problems already. But there was no keen marketing 
eye in our team at the time. Therefore we went on with the theme to 
design a website. Our brilliant-but-weird designer didn’t like the idea 
of getting his hands dirty with web design. Therefore we had to find a 
different chap. We were not that lucky this time. We went through 
several design iterations, getting from bad to worse. We were getting 
nowhere, and the time was running out. In the end I got angry, pulled 
together some pieces from the design proposals and glued them together 
with my amateur web design skills. It worked. We got our first company 
website.

Evolveum 2011 Website

It looked swell! Just kidding. It was a disaster. But this was the best 
we could do at the time. By the end of summer we have got our web 
presence up and running, on our old server in the suburbs, connected to 
the Internet by a slow and unreliable link. It was a start.

Of course, the early days of Evolveum were not all about the looks. We 
were also working on a business strategy, although the word “strategy” 
is perhaps a huge exaggeration here. All of us fellow conspirators were 
running businesses for some time already. We had /some/ business 
experience. However, those were local, east-europe-style freelance-like 
businesses. We had only a very rough idea what it means to run a global 
business. But more on that later.

(Reposted from Evolveum blog 
<https://evolveum.com/preparing-evolveums-look/>)

-- 
Radovan Semancik
Software Architect
evolveum.com

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