About Us

I-Next was founded in 1995 as a specialist web design agency. Initially focussing on technology companies and media, we were soon publishing some of the most prestigious electronics websites in the UK:

  • Electronics Weekly - HyperActive
  • The Institution of Electrical Engineers Forum and Professional Networks sites
  • GEC Plessey Semiconductors
  • CADServer
  • Cadence Europe

In working with these large companies and sites from such early days on the web we learned the fundamental principles of running a good website:

  • Design:  Graphics and structure.
  • Technology: Systems, features and functions.
  • Hosting: Fast, scalable, secure and reliable
  • Promotion: SEO friendliness
  • Support: Expert and accessible

Having looked around the open source content management projects at the time, we took these principles into the development of our own, proprietary, content management system.  We made this the core of a website management platform, I-ntarsia(TM).

Initially, I-ntarsia was marketed as our exclusive management system. However, in the early 'noughties' increasing interest and demand from specialist design and digital agencies led to us establishing the I-ntarsia Reseller Programme. This allowed focus exclusively on the I-ntarsia system and reseller network.

Three types of client emerged:

  1. Creative and marketing agencies who need web expertise to complement their creative skills in delivering web content
  2. Medium and large enterprises who need to deliver multiple websites and services across their brand base in a cost-effective manner
  3. Vertical solutions providers who needed a flexible web platform to deliver specific web applications to larger clients

Working with these clients I-ntarsia has been used to create:

  • Multi-brand corporate and e-commerce sites
  • Award-winning Channel Sales Support programmes
  • Innovative web startups 
  • Corporate Reward and Recognition systems
  • Corporate Reward and Recognition and Ecode promotion systems 
  • Long Service Award systems 
  • Pure play e-commerce startups
  • Clicks and mortar e-commerce sites

Much of the focus whilst delivering these great projects was on using the flexibility of the I-ntarsia platform to add specific functionality for our three core client types as well as developing management systems and infrastructure for handling rapidly growing digital estates. We released two major versions of the I-ntarsia platform and numerous minor revisions. In 2014 we started planning Version 3.0.

By early 2015 we benchmarked the core, proprietary, content management and e-commerce elements of the I-ntarsia system against popular open-source alternatives. We were excited to find that the content management system which showed most promise back in 2004, Drupal, had now matured. Indeed, the latest release at the time, Drupal 8, was a complete, ground-up rewrite and addressed all of the issues that we had seen with earlier versions. At this point, the decision was taken to replace the proprietary CMS elements of I-ntarsia with Drupal 8. 

In developing the third version of I-ntarsia we found that Drupal 8 fitted well into the I-ntarsia framework and that it made using Drupal a far more sensible proposition for our type of customer (or indeed any web project owner). The only thing that didn’t fit was the version numbering. We wanted the version numbers of the I-ntarsia platform to be meaningful to our customers, and we also wanted to adopt as closely as sensible semantic versioning. To do this sensibly we had to re-version I-ntarsia 3.0 to I-ntarsia 8.16.1 which was the first release of a Drupal-based I-ntarsia in July 2016.

The first service delivered on I-ntarsia 8.16.1 was an internal Product Information Database for Redring Xpelair Group (RXG), used to manage all of the marketing and technical data associated with their 10,000 product portfolio. The system integrates with the corporate ERP system and their estate of e-commerce websites.