5 years of Mestrelab (year 5) – The present
I finished the last post writing about our move to the new office, and about how this allowed us to grow the team further, which we immediately started doing, with the additions of Dani, our internet marketing specialist, and Jose, Michael and Esther to the development team, taking our headcount to 15 people during 2009, and extending our areas of expertise further beyond NMR.
The early part of the year was marked by the 50th ENC, held at Asilomar. We arrived at ENC after also having a booth at the ACS Spring in Salt Lake City, and once at ENC we graduated into a full blown suite, Curlew, which has an excellent location in the middle of the Asilomar grounds, and which was very popular with visitors throughout the conference. We look forward to returning there many times in the future. The ENC conference was great, with many very interesting sessions, including an excellent, and very nostalgic, historical session with many of the big names in NMR as presenters. It was a privilege to be able to attend it.
After ENC, Chen and I went back to China and started a very positive collaboration, with our Chinese distributor, TLWB, a company with a large presence in the Chinese NMR community who has been doing a great job at promoting our software and opening new business opportunities. I blogged extensively on my trip to China on this blog at the time, so I will not add anymore here.
Also on the blog you will find summaries and stories about many of the conferences were we exhibited this year, ASMS in Philadelphia, ACS in Washington, CoSMoS in Boston, EUROMAR in Goteborg, IMSC in Bremen, ESOR in Haifa and SMASH in Chamonix. They are all also covered on the blog if you would like to find out more about our activities there.
The main event of the year, from a product point of view, was the launch of our LC/GC/MS plugin for Mnova, in September. This makes Mnova not only multivendor and multiplatform, but also multitechnique, representing a first step in our original objective when designing the application, thought out not only as an NMR software, but rather as a ‘Chemistry Software Suite’. Mnova MS has been developed in collaboration with Sierra and has met with an excellent reception from our customer base, with many people keen to evaluate it and many purchasing licenses already.
Towards the end of the year, we also passed the milestone of 50 academic campus licenses, many of them held by some of the most prestigious Universities in the World, and a number of corporate companies have during this year chosen Mnova NMR as their NMR processing tool of choice, continuing with a trend which we saw started last year. So, our project is meeting with great commercial success, the software is ever more popular, and this is giving us the opportunity to keep building both our internal development team and our network of collaborations, which will result on a series of exciting product launches and new features in the near / mid term future.
The last 5 years have been a very exciting ride, which has been made possible by the confidence and support of our many users (in excess of 20,000 paying licensees around the World), by our collaborators and by the hard working and dedicated team at Mestrelab. To all those, the Mestrelab founders want to extend a very heartfelt thank you. We look forward to continuing to work towards delivering excellent quality Chemistry software for the community, and to continuing to work in an inspiring market filled with creative and challenging (in a positive way) customers.
Over the next few days, I will publish one more blog, on the future, but this will be more filled with questions than answers (although there may be a few of those). We have some ideas about where we are going, but we really want to ask the community, once more, where they think we should be going and which needs we should be aiming to cover.
I hope you have enjoyed this historical series on Mestrelab, I cannot believe 5 years have gone by already! Any comments or questions are welcome.
We are celebrating Mestrelab’s 5th anniversary!
We are celebrating our first 5 years in business. This post belongs to a series of posts where Santi is summarizing what we did and this 5 years and what we plan to do in the future.
