Company History

Founded as a communications firm, the Company first realized the opportunity for combining interactive multimedia, business communication design and computer networking in early 1994. By developing such communications with a technology to deliver content of all kinds to the desktop of any employee in real time, the Company could revolutionize knowledge transfer, creating a new learning and support paradigm. This was the birth of Mentor.

The first Mentor was delivered in August 1995 to KPMG Peat Marwick for its knowledge management Intranet system. KPMG's 37% reduction in Help Desk calls and a significant reduction in training and deployment made it clear that Mentor was viable. In early 1996, the Company was contracted by IBM to develop Custom Mentor products for its clients: IBM Consulting Group, Ernst & Young, and a third global consulting firm, all for knowledge management systems.

In October 1996, a breakthrough in compression technology allowed the Company to deploy Mentor products over any computer network, Internet, or Intranet system, to anyone with as little as a 28.8kbps modem. In February 1997, IBM signed an agreement to purchase a Mentor™ for Lotus Notes. The company began the process of developing Custom Mentor concepts into a packaged product and completed Mentor™ for Lotus Notes 4.5 in October 1997.

In September 1997, the Company signed a remarketing agreement for IBM to resell Mentor™ for Lotus Notes. Over the next year, the Company received orders from Duke Energy, Phillips Petroleum, State Farm Insurance, DuPont, Bayer Diagnostics, Transamerica, Canon USA, Colgate-Palmolive, and Reuters. By the first quarter of 1998, the Company had shifted its business strategy to focus exclusively on the rich opportunity in the e-Learning space and on making Mentor the dominant brand in its category.

Throughout the next two years, the Company continued to expand both its product line and its custom work. Off-the-shelf products now cover a broad market of major Microsoft and Lotus applications, including multilingual versions. Custom clients include over 6 of the top 10 Fortune 100 companies. More recently, the Company's custom work has earned an international award for its work in the consumer market, supporting technology manufactures and ISPs.

In January of 2001, as a result of its growth, of the increasing market acceptance of Mentor as a learning standard, and with over eight million user seats of Mentor products sold, the Company relocated to fully renovated, state-of-the-art facilities in Norwalk Connecticut.