My career has always been filled not only with opportunities, but also amazing people.
Oracle since day 1
In 1986, when I got my first job straight out of school, it was downtown Montreal at a company called CGI. At that time, there was a new team specializing in a new database technology called “Oracle”. This was my first experience working with a talented group of people all aiming to be the best at what they do.
During my time there I met Michel St-Amour. He was the founder and president of the Oracle User Group of Eastern Canada – Ora*GEC . Talk about networking and sharing knowledge, about having fun challenging each other with database questions, about learning and having access to great content and knowledgeable people!
In 1992, I became a freelancer. So I founded my own small company to provide Oracle consulting services. The market was going crazy with Oracle Forms, Oracle Reports, Oracle Designer and Oracle 7.3 …
In order to grow my network and find work, I reached out to Michel. Michel had been a consultant and a freelancer for many years, and was kind enough to guide me through the launch of my new business.
An association for freelancers
Shortly after that, in 1993, Michel and I decided to create an association for freelancers in Québec. We called it l’ Association Québécoise des Informaticiennes et Informaticiens Indépendants – AQIII (www.aqiii.org). The goal was to help freelancers gain access to services, insurance, social events, conferences, and network with others to have a better access to projects and better knowledge of the IT market. This association still exists today, and numbers thousands of members.
Insum is born
It was in 2002 that Michel and I, along with Patrick Bonneville and Paul Farley, decided to combine our strengths and expertise.
We founded Insum Solutions inc. (insum.talan.com) with the goal of working on bigger projects and building a business. By the way, for those who don’t know, Insum is a real Latin word meaning “Being in/part of”, so hence “Insum Solutions”.
Again, great people lead to great things.
Now, I’m not going to talk about our discovery of APEX in this blog, but you can find out more in an earlier post that I did in 2016 : https://insum.talan.com/how-oracle-apex-changed-my-life/
But I do want to talk about amazing people!
Between 2004 and today, we met great people in the APEX community, all over the world. Above all, the Oracle APEX team has been an example to follow, led by Mike Hichwa and the late and sorely missed Joel Kallman.
Along the way, so many great people decided to join our wild adventure and become part of the Insum family. We like to call them “Insum Material”. I’m talking about the well-known Monty Latiolais, Patrick Cimolini, Anton Nielsen, Adrian Png, Michelle Skamene, Steven Feuerstein, and more.
We have great ambassadors and talented experts like Neelesh Shah, Rich Soule, Sylvain Martel, Keny Colina, Luc Demanche, David Lopez, Réginald Horacius and again so many more.
Internally, we have amazing people that works in operations, human resources, finance, sales. I’m talking about Charles Brochu, Marina Medeiros, Serge Marcotte, Pierre Gillespie-Kerr, Roger Leblanc, Christopher Jackson, Johanna Beaulieu, and again, many many others.
Throughout the years, we’ve added people to our teams that are based in different cities around the globe, and we’ve opened offices in Plattsburgh, Arequipa (Peru) and Boston.
There is one thing that has been consistent throughout: great people lead to great things…
It’s still so hard to believe so many people came along for the ride and have Insum’s success at heart. I want to say a huge thank you, and above all, this is far from over. The adventure only gets more exciting and continues from here.
A new adventure begins
Today, we have decided to leap forward and follow the same instincts that have served us so well all these years. We are joining the Talan Group (https://talan.com/). A great company that shares our values. A great team of people, motivated and excited by the potential of APEX.
I truly believe that this partnership with Talan will bring tons of exciting new projects and amazing people together. The future is full of potential and exciting opportunities.
We can now definitely say that we are 100% on target with Insum’s mission of being the world’s Center of Excellence for Oracle APEX.
Congratulations to Talan and Insum!
Great people lead to great things. The future is a Playfield.
For more information on the Talan and Insum partnership, read our press release.
