Metapack’s 20th anniversary
This year, Metapack celebrates its 20th anniversary. A formal meeting on this occasion took place on November 4 at our Coffee Spot. There were thanks, summaries and of course a delicious cake.
At the beginning of its existence, only a dozen or so people worked at Metapack. Today, in the Zielona Góra headquarters there are over 170 really talented people. And this is only one of our three offices, as the other two are located in London and the United States.
On November 4, we decided to celebrate our jubilee and invited the entire team to meet over a birthday cake. We looked back at our last years and made plans for the future in an intimate atmosphere. We asked Marcin, the Founder and Managing Director at Metapack Poland, about the most significant milestones in the company’s life:
The first milestone was 2006 when, as a company in Zielona Góra, we acquired Dutch postal services as a customer. This was an important event. Moments after that, we started selling our system as pure functionality via webservice. It was a novelty because everyone was used to front-end programs, and we decided to offer back-end functionality. The next milestone was 2010 when we moved here to a larger office and 2013 when we became part of Metapack. And it was certainly last year, 2018, when we joined a publicly traded company.
Marcin
Managing Director at Metapack Poland
We asked Darek, the Director, Carrier Platform Product Ownership, a similar question. What technological decisions were crucial for Metapack:
I think the first important moment was the choice of technology. It was the time of open-source solutions, Java and Microsoft's introduction of .Net. We chose the latter due to the fact that at that time it was not yet clear which way these open-source solutions would go. The second important moment is when we looked at our system much more generically. So not for the Austrian or Dutch postal system, but for a product that will be sold much more widely. There was no talk of e-commerce then, we were building a system for integration in national mail. As this online sales began to develop, we made the decision to start building a retailer solution in the e-commerce world.
Darek
Director, Carrier Platform Product Ownership
A perfect sense of the market needs allowed us to adapt our solutions and expand the group of our clients. We still use the technologies selected years ago, but we also use new, equally advanced and more modern ones. This allows us to maintain high standards and remain a leader in the industry, although some of our decisions have been criticized.
The decision to make our product available for integration through the so-called API, in webservice, was significant. - Darek says. - Many people were wondering back then - why are we building it, who will want to integrate in this way? A year has passed since that decision and the trend to integrate through webservice was already noticeable. This decision hit the spot.
Darek
Director, Carrier Platform Product Ownership
However, it was not always so colorful. Stress situations, as in any large company, have arisen and continue to occur, and each key decision was associated with uncertainty. We invested a lot of money on solutions that were not yet tested and we were not sure if this investment would pay off.
However, as Darek describes, they had to deal with the greatest stresses at the very beginning of the company’s existence:
There were many more working nights before we even connected with Metapack. We were a small company that grew very organically. There were very large projects and we were not a large team. We wanted to undertake these projects and become a leader on the European market. So in fact, we were doing too much, which generated a lot of stress. But it was worth it. This effect was visible when customers came in through doors and windows because they knew they could count on something that they themselves did not have on the market.
Darek
Director, Carrier Platform Product Ownership
Big projects, a small team and huge ambitions made the 2013 merger with Metapack a natural stage of development. We reached the tipping point then, when we were no longer able to go further without large external capital. This strategic decision also gave us a lot from the point of view of the culture prevailing in the company, more oriented towards a planned approach to what we implement. At the moment, we are developing the product instead of implementing projects quickly and this tendency is currently the most popular in global IT companies.
So this is how it was, and what are our plans for the future? Obviously very ambitious!
We would like everyone who thinks about efficient management of the process of delivering parcels to the customer to say: Metapack. This is our most important goal. Our second dream is for the first shipment that goes to Mars to be handled by our system.
Marcin
Managing Director at Metapack Poland
