When Phillip Merrick started software firm webMethods in 1996, his goal was to develop technologies that helped companies to integrate their disparate computing systems and to automate business transactions via the Internet.
It was an idea whose time had come: a single view of business operations from any application, from any location, anywhere in the world.
Mr Merrick, who co-founded webMethods with spouse Caren DeWitt, knew there was a lot of work ahead to attract investors and corporate users. So far, it has been quite a ride for everyone involved with webMethods.
'I had no idea that we would go through such a ridiculous experience of peaks and troughs,' said the London-born, Australia-raised Mr Merrick.
A graduate of computer science from the University of Melbourne, Mr Merrick, 40, held positions as vice-president of engineering at Australian firm Open Software Associates and director at Magna Software prior to establishing webMethods in Fairfax, Virginia.
He credits World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee for showing him the merits of XML (extensible mark-up language) as a flexible standard to create common information formats and to share both the format and the data on the Web, intranets, and other data communications networks.
With generous loans from friends and family, Mr Merrick wrote the code for webMethods' first products from his home. With extra help from their own personal savings and charged-to-the-max credit cards, he and his wife took their start-up firm on the road to favourable reviews from early corporate adopters.