IBA Bronze Stevie: Most Innovative Tech Company of 2019

What, another one...?

Following on from winning the IBA Silver Stevie award for Most Innovative Tech Company of 2018, this time we’re proud to have been honored with a Bronze Stevie in the International Business Awards for 2019.

The awards are based on company achievements since the beginning of 2018, and this was an exciting year for our company.  We continued the evolution of our iText 7 platform, with new partnerships through the Developers Platform that was launched in 2018. This program allows developers with great ideas to partner with us to create new products that are marketed and sold as iText products with revenue sharing for the partners.

Besides new partnership projects, our core passion is evolving the iText 7 SDK and we focused on improving technology and access in 2018 with five maintenance releases to improve functionality and respond to bugs.

We also decided to expand our product offering to include iText DITO, a high-convenience data-driven document generation engine that combines WYSIWYG browser-based template design with an SDK built to handle enterprise-level requirements and volumes. The beauty of iText DITO is that it combines low-code PDF generation with a no-code design environment, easing the load on development teams and enabling more collaborative working with citizen developers and business users.

We worked on R&D and some beta testing during 2018, in preparation for the launch in 2019. Since that initial launch, we have continued to develop and add new features, and as the following case studies show, a growing number of customers have been impressed by its ease of use and flexibility, plus its ability to greatly reduce development time.

Another major project in 2018 was to test and launch a new website for the company. Launching at the end of 2018, the initial results of the new website showed clearly that when you listen to your target audience, they will respond. We saw traffic increases and improved our conversion rate by 55%. But instead of stopping there, we looked ahead to new audiences for upcoming products, and built the site with room to grow for the business users.

Not forgetting our focus on developers however, throughout 2019 we worked on integrating embedded demonstrations of iText 7 Core and its growing number of add-ons directly into the product pages, enabling you to see exactly how they work.

Meanwhile, back in 2018, our headquarters in Belgium moved to state-of-the-art facilities in the Technology Park in Zwijnaarde, Ghent. We are in good company with the many international technology start-ups, scale-ups but also multinationals that are located there.

Last, but by no means least, we were given a seat on the PDF Association's Board of Directors, marking our recognition as an industry leader, and an established expert in the PDF space.

We're looking forward to seeing if we can bag a Gold Stevie in the IBA Awards for 2020, fingers crossed!