Our story
Since the beginning, Smile has always been one step ahead in regards to technological advances. A pioneer of high productivity development tools and a pioneer of Internet technologies, since 2001 Smile has been at the forefront of the open source revolution enabling the most ambitious companies to benefit from competitive gains offered by these new solutions without needing to take any risks.
In the beginning
Smile was founded in 1991 by four friends from the Ecole Centrale de Paris and the Ecole Supérieur d'Electricité who all had around five years experience working with large French companies (Shell, Thomson, Renault, Cap Gemini). Smile first focussed on management applications for micro-computers using development tools known as "RAD" (Rapid Application Development) which had started to appear.
The Internet
In 1995, Smile still only employed seven people when the World Wide Web appeared. Smile quickly turned towards this new world and developed special expertise in the area mixing knowledge of applications, databases and web technologies. In these first few years, many were content to use static web pages, that is to say simple pages of information. Smile however immediately turned to web applications. Since 1996, this expertise has been recognised by our large clients. In the same year, Société Générale asked one of our associates to create and manage a team of web experts, whilst Crédit Lyonnais entrusted us to produce the first Internet banking site. In 1997, it was Renault's turn to request one of the first web applications from Smile which was subsequently followed by many others. Since the beginning, Smile has had major accounts. 1996-2001 was the first period of strong growth with turnover increasing fivefold in just 5 years; it was the first wave of the Internet. Towards the end of 2000, Smile had 47 employees and a turnover of 3.5 M€. 2001-2003 constituted crises years for the market, the famous Internet bubble burst. Smile rode through the crisis - which resulted in many web agencies closing their doors - by maintaining business volmes and profitability.
Open source
Since 2001, Smile started building expertise in open source solutions: a forward thinking decision as many competitors didn't dare learn how to use it. From 2004, more and more large companies chose to use open source solutions. Smile firmly held the leading position for this market that was just taking off, gradually expanding its offer into new areas - CMS, Portals, e-Commerce, Business Intelligence, Infrastructure, ERP - and creating associated services: media agency, third party maintenance, operations, systems.
In 2007, Smile achieved more than 50% growth and opened three new offices in Lyon, Nantes and Bordeaux.
In 2008, Smile had more than 270 employees and continued its growth by developing internationally, in particular opening an office in Kiev in the Ukraine.
In 2009, Smile had 320 employees worldwide and continued its international expansion. In June 2009, Smile joined forces with Cometa Technologies S.L., based in Barcelona and created an office in Geneva, Switzerland.
In 2010, Smile counts 400 employees and opened its 10th agency in Amsterdam.
