Meridian's history

Meridian's key characteristics of flexibility, business solution orientation, focus on delivery, identification with our customer and long term perspective were established early in it's existence and have been continuously refined and refocused to maintain excellence in the business and technical services we offer to our clients in an every changing environment.

Beginnings (1990-1994)

Meridian was formed in late 1989 by the staff of the CSR Limited MIS Group. Following 6 years as an successful, respected internal consultancy and a positive review from McKinsey & Company and in a frenzy of entrepreneurial zeal they decided to outsource themselves.

At the time CSR was one of the largest Australian diversified companies and the MIS Group was responsible for IT services in a very wide range of clients including CSR's Corporate HQ, Group "common" systems and some of the operating divisions including Oil & Gas, Coal, Minerals and Sugar. With the support of senior management the staff of the MIS Group formed Meridian Information Services offering IT services to former internal clients.

Building on its expertise in the Cognos PowerHouse 4GL Meridian sought partnerships with suppliers of packages on this platform. These included StarGarden (Vancouver), HR & Payroll; Visibility (Boston), "custom" manufacturing and relationships with other suppliers in North America, Asia and Europe. Additionally Meridian developed and offered a set of middle range financials especially targeted to project accounting.

Projects in New Zealand, Singapore, Indonesia, Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane broadened Meridian's client base making it one of the major regional suppliers of custom and packaged software written for PowerHouse, deployed on Digital VAX & Alpha (VMS & Unix), Data General (AOS & Aviion Unix), IBM AS/400, IBM RS/6000 (AIX), Sun Unix and Intel PC (SCO Unix & MS-DOS) platforms.

Re-focus (1995-1999)

By the mid 1990s PowerHouse was "maturing" as a development language. Meridian adopted new platforms, architectures and languages to better service the evolving needs of it's clients while maintaining focus on business areas in which it could continue excellence and mastery.

To aid this revised focus Meridian was reorganised into two business units, "Banking & Finance" and "Government & Health Services". Meridian redirected its technical focus towards the MS Windows based languages (Visual Basic, PowerBuilder, C++) for client development and C for Unix server development as well as new deployment options on Windows NT servers. From 1996 our attention increasingly turned to Java and the Web for both client and server solutions.

Meridian's Government & Health Services division developed a range of clinical software solutions which were installed in a majority of major public hospitals throughout the state of New South Wales.

In early 1995 Meridian & FICS Group (Belgium), at that time the leading European supplier of electronic banking products, formed a joint venture to promote, implement and support FICS products in Australia. Meridian wholly funded, resourced and managed this joint venture until 1998.

Meridian staff custom developed a corporate electronic banking product for the Commonwealth Bank (Diammond Services) and resourced joint projects to substantially customise, implement and support FICS products for Westpac (Business DeskBank), National Australia Bank (Retail Internet) and the design stages for St George Bank (ebank). Meridian staff participated in other overseas FICS projects in electronic banking and prudential regulatory reporting.

Differing business philosophies and a reorganisation of FICS Group's global operations resulted in the joint venture being dissolved in mid 1998. Meridian continued the support and development roles with the Commonwealth Bank while customers with FICS product based solutions were transferred to FICS Group resources. FICS was taken over by the US based S1 Corporation shortly afterwards and ceased to exist as a separate entity, S1 ceased operating in Australian in 2003.

Meridian continues to deliver electronic banking client & server products for high volume and secure transaction management, payments systems, transaction billing and reporting / business intelligence solutions for the Commonwealth Bank.

New Beginnings (2000+)

By 2000 it was clear that Meridian's two business units had diminished synergy and overlap. The needs and expectations of customers, technologies employed and business models adopted had become so different that it was decided the business units would become separate and independent companies.

A new company, Meridian Health Informatics, continued the Govt & Health business, taking on additional shareholders with existing operations in the Health sector, while Meridian Informatics continues an enhanced Banking and Finance software focus. This allows both businesses to remain focused on the specific requirements of their respective customer sectors.

Meridian Informatics has standardised on enterprise technologies including Java and MS .NET facilitated via it's involvement in the development of business object frameworks with international partners and adoption of Open Source tools & components. These have been used as the basis for projects for the Commonwealth Bank, EDS Australia, Colonial First State Investments, Ipac Securities and other clients.

Meridian has further enhanced it's Business Intelligence / Corporate Performance Management practice using Cognos, Microsoft & Open Source tools to deliver complete integrated Data Warehouse and reporting solutions.

In 2004 Meridian celebrates 10 years of continuous projects & support with the Commonwealth Bank.