Pathfinder Development Celebrates 10th Anniversary

(Chicago, IL) Pathfinder, a leading software development and user experience design firm headquartered in Chicago, has recently reached a major milestone by celebrating its 10th anniversary.

“This is a tremendous achievement for our firm”, said Bernhard Kappe, Pathfinder’s Chief Executive Officer and a founding member. “We continue to have great success delivering systems for our clients that drive new revenue opportunities and deliver competitive advantage”.

“More and more companies are differentiating themselves by creating better user experiences because effectively designed solutions have proven to save time and money by streamlining development efforts, increasing satisfaction and promoting brand loyalty”, said Matt Nolker, Pathfinder Partner and Director of User Experience Design. “Over the years we have focused on perfecting the integration of design and development, resulting in easy, efficient and effective applications that drive business results for our clients”.

Pathfinder started in 1998, as a developer cooperative with four founding members, three of which were located in Seattle and one in Chicago. One of Pathfinder’s first clients, Mesirow Financial, contracted Pathfinder to build an on-line account and brokerage application. The team consisted of three people and took three months to build the application which resulted in an extensible, skinable, platform that Mesirow was able to leverage for the next 8 years.

“We saw enormous potential for developing custom web applications. 10 years ago there were no application servers and the technology was very different”, said Dietrich Kappe, Chief Technology Officer and founding member. “We thrived on solving complex business problems using technology and that passion continues to drive our business”.

During the last decade the web has completely changed the way most of us interact with media and accessing information. The Sun-Times enlisted Pathfinder’s expertise on several different projects that ranged from stabilizing their infrastructure to meet the demands of rapid growth and exponentially increasing amount of information, to developing an Open Source content management system that leverages a wide array of publications and feeds, to the recent release of the YourSeason Facebook application that attracts new audiences and reaps the benefits of social networking.

“Developing long term relationships with our clients and ensuring their satisfaction has been key to our success and longevity”, said Alan Choyna, Pathfinder Partner and Chief Information Officer. “We pride ourselves on our integrity and providing our clients with outstanding service.”

Now over forty employees, Pathfinder offers full-life cycle software development solutions and services. Pathfinder combines user centered design together with Agile development to deliver software projects on-time, on-target and on-budget and offers services to provide high performance and secure environments that support complex, business applications and web sites.

Some notable Pathfinder projects over the last decade include work for Avenue A, BEZ, Datacolor, DePaul University, GE, Haemonetics Software Solutions, Marsh, National Opinion Research Center (NORC), OptionsXpress, Rand McNally, The Marmon Group, and Ziff Davis.

Pathfinder is privately-held and headquartered in Chicago, with a satellite office in New York. The firm continues to grow, based on its solid performance, customer satisfaction and the increasing demand for easy to use custom software and rich internet applications. Pathfinder has been named to the Software 500 for the last three years in a row and has received several industry accolades. For more information contact Eleanor Taylor at 312-372-1058, email to etaylor@pathf.com, or visit http://www.pathf.com.