6. COMPANY GROWTH
In 1983 the DATAMINE team consisted of just 4 people, but with our first sales, and requests for additional capabilities, we rapidly grew. It is impossible in one post to name everyone, but key recruits in the 1980s included Greg Warren, who implemented the IBM PC/AT version of DATAMINE (which progressively became our main development platform), Adam Wheeler, a Cornish mining engineer with extensive underground experience in Canada, who developed DATAMINE’s underground mine planning applications, Giorgio De Tomi, who contributed his expertise across the board but in particular joined Ron Dougill in our marketing group, and Jonathan Dadswell, a mine surveyor who extended DATAMINE into surveying applications. At the same time, internationally we set up agencies around the world. Our first agent in Australia was Lynn Widenbar (later with Micromine), followed by Jim Askew and Tim McAuley of James Askew Associates - which later became AMC. Growth of our Australian business was such that we needed to expand the operation there, and set up a jointly owned company with Jim and Tim - and secondment of Malcolm Newton. We had an active agency in South Africa to serve a growing customer base there, run by Richard Rice and Dominic Simes. In North America we had a small office in Canada run by Daniel LeBlanc, later joined by Greg Warren from the UK, and established a 50-50 partnership in Denver with Geosolutions. This was an independent mining software company that had inherited a number of software products from Control Data, owned by Berry Jeffrey, Warren Taylor, and Frank Daviess. Among all the DATAMINE agencies, sales performance in the US was disappointing, and in 1992 we terminated the partnership. Until that point we had avoided any form of litigation with anyone, but this sadly resulted in legal mediation by a federal judge.
By 1989 DATAMINE had grown to over 30 staff in London and around the world. We had long outgrown the attic office in Henrietta Street. In February 1985 we had moved to take a whole floor (and later a second floor) at the corner of Langham Place and Regent Street North, still in central London, and it was ony just big enough for us. By then I had moved house to Stratford-on-Avon, and we also rented an additional large office space in Warwick University Science Park. However, within two years we outgrew this, too, and moved the ‘country’ office to Wells, Somerset, which became the centre for DATAMINE software development for many years. We recruited as Wells office manager David Tucker from the quarrying industry, who lived nearby. We had developed a number of applications specifically for quarrying, and had several important clients to support in south-west England.
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4moHi Mark, Do you need a french sales man?