How it all started.
In 1998, Marc Laporte founded AvanTech, which was later rebranded as EvoluData. For a number of years prior to that, he was a freelance developer providing solutions locally and internationally that were primarily related to e-commerce, websites, and web apps. He was using many proprietary and Open Source software solutions including Tiki. As the world was just opening up to the "World-Wide Web" and witnessing its business potential, it comes as no surprise that a lot of important web-centric projects started this time around, such as Tiki.
From the very beginning, AvanTech supported non-profit organizations in managing their data and documentation, with Tiki playing a central role in these successes.
One organization, faced with high staff turnover, needed a way to capture and preserve employees' tacit knowledge. Tiki's wiki features provided the perfect solution—creating living documents that were searchable, versioned, and always up to date. Around the same time, the organization's youth branch turned to Tiki's "trackers" to organize events, assign tasks, and monitor progress.
The impact was clear: Tiki not only solved real-world challenges, but also proved its strength as a collaboration and knowledge-management platform. This inspired us to make Tiki our primary focus. Marc continued to contribute as a community leader, while the project grew rapidly, reaching hundreds of developers, adding major features, and even earning a Bossie Award from InfoWorld for Best of Open Source Software.
Today, Tiki has been downloaded over one million times, has developed a community of users and continues to thrive with dozens of active developers. With more than 200 core features, Tiki powers a wide range of projects from websites and content management to employee support and data solutions; making it one of the most versatile Open Source platforms available.
In 2006, after years of working for various private sector organizations, we proudly landed our first public sector contract with the AETMIS ("Agence d’évaluation des technologies et des modes d’intervention en santé", which later merged into the INESSS, "Institut national d’excellence en santé et en services sociaux"). The AETMIS initially approached us to implement an employee intranet.
This initial foray solidified our presence in the public sector, especially in the healthcare industry. We consider this as a significant achievement at a time when the public sector was completely dominated by proprietary software, and the general public was just beginning to become aware of the advantages of Open Source software in regard to public resources. AvanTech proved to be a pioneer in advancing this trend and mindset, helping to bring Free and Open Source software philosophy and methodologies from a developers-centric community to the halls of public offices.
To this day, we continue servicing clients in the public sector, as well as various NGOs, alongside our many clients from the private sector. We actively participate in the public tender process locally and internationally, and have documented our findings on Open Source Procurement.
Expanding Tiki into WikiSuite, and rebranding from AvanTech to EvoluData
WikiSuite was launched as a turn-key package combining Tiki with various other Open Source technologies, offering clients more functionality and better integration for asynchronous and synchronous collaboration. We integrated other Open Source solutions like Jitsi, Xibo, ElasticSearch, Openfire and Roundcube which further enhanced our competency across many projects. Some of these components have since then been replaced by other, more suitable Open Source components, but the core idea remains the same: WikiSuite is a turn-key package focused on entreprise solutions, while remaining a 100% Free and Open Source collection of software from beginning to end. You can learn more on the WikiSuite website.
AvanTech made a branding change to become EvoluData and focus on the "evolution of data" that is taking place in the enterprise, and to expand our team’s contribution to that story. Twenty years ago, enterprise systems operated largely behind firewalls; department heads bought apps to suit their functional needs without considering the re-usable value of the data to work smarter, and of course this was before social computing, or "the cloud", or big data. The world of enterprise information management has evolved, and Open Source and EvoluData have evolved with it.