I met Stephen Page, chief executive of the Sapphire Group, the other day. His office had arranged a lunch at the Soho Hotel, and given that this is just up the road from where I planned to be in the morning it was ideal. I know that the bar at the Soho hotel is usually full of pretty young things planning their first steps into reality TV, so it’s no great hardship to spend a couple of hours in there.

Stephen formed Sapphire back in the late 1970s so he is something of an industry veteran – and I don’t mean that to sound condescending. These days people talk about their IT company having an extensive heritage if it existed ‘last century’ – usually meaning they were formed in 1999 and managed to ride out the crash of 2000. It’s always nice to talk to someone who really has suffered the slings and arrows of the IT market over a number of decades.

When Stephen explained that his company was responsible for the relational database product Dataease I was transported back to my computer science student days in the 1980s. Those were the days when even Windows users needed to have an ability to tinker around in DOS, changing the order various programs load into memory to maximise the capability of the feeble PCs we had to use back then. Dataease is one of those products that were steamrollered out of sight by the juggernaut that is Microsoft Office. Lotus 1-2-3, WordPerfect, and (later on) Netscape, all suffered a similar fate.

I can remember using all these tool ages ago, even using them as DOS applications. Anyone born this side of 1970 would probably find it hard to comprehend how something like a wordprocessor could work when you can’t see on the screen what you are going to get on paper, but I remember working on City trading floors in the early 1990s as Windows started becoming ubiquitous and the howls of anguish from City traders used to all those old DOS shortcuts could be heard all the way across town.

You might be asking, how come this trip down Memory Lane is connected in any way to the outsourcing theme of this blog? The issue is legacy systems. There are still hundreds of thousands of Dataease users out there and they need to be supported; in addition Sapphire has never stopped improving the product with a regular series of version upgrades to the present day.

Sapphire found that it was increasingly hard to get the skills it needed to support Dataease locally and so they ended up employing a Russian team. It’s no surprise that it became difficult to find skilled people here because it has not been a compelling addition to the CV of IT professionals for some time now.

Time passed and now Stephen is an old hand at offshoring to a number of countries. What has happened as well over time is that Stephen found new opportunities thanks to the huge installed base of Dataease users – where Sapphire was a trusted face and now with skilled offshore development resource the company found itself getting contracts that had nothing to do with Dataease.

One of the most impressive examples of new tech developed by Sapphire is possibly the BetBrokers engine, a very impressive broking system that can help punters lay bets across several bookmakers as well as allowing bookmakers to hedge their own risk. As Stephen described the control engine that runs this system it reminded me of the complex automated equity trading systems used by fund managers, who rely on technology to drip feed blocks of shares into the market in a way that creates minimal impact on the share price.

Stephen’s company has been transformed by the opportunity to work offshore, sometimes with his own teams and sometimes with partners. It’s a great example of an organisation flourishing thanks to the flexibility offered by a global talent pool – if he stuck his head in the sand years ago and carried on trying to recruit in Romford alone then Dataease and all the new opportunities created by that network of users would  have been missed.