Tranquil IT celebrates its 20th anniversary

Tranquil IT is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year. On this occasion, a series of articles traces its history.

Birth of Tranquil IT

Tranquil IT is a family-owned company run by two brothers: Vincent and Denis Cardon.

First of all, the idea of setting up a company together appeared to them as a life option, Denis no longer liking his IT services company and Vincent freshly back from a 10-year experience in the United States. So, on November 2, 2002, the two brothers founded Tranquil IT at the Tribunal de Commerce de Saumur with 100 shares and €37,000 in capital. Initially, Tranquil IT was a company specializing in outsourcing.
At the outset, the idea can be attributed to Denis, who was working for Parisian IT services companies, after graduating from Nancy’s Ecole des Mines. Seeing no opportunity for rapid advancement, Denis had the impetus to set up his own company with Vincent. And so, at just 24 and 26 years of age, this new project began.
Together, they were determined to build their company around open source software, as they shared the same philosophy of sharing knowledge and collaboration. The year 2002 closed with a turnover of €25 for a mouse and an ADSL filter sold to a neighbor. Hopes were high…

First customers: 2002-2005

The beginning of success?

A nuclear power plant customer for whom Vincent and Denis had previously worked calls them one day in a panic. His problem was that he had sold a dosimetry forecasting and monitoring service for 500 people. Except that his company had experience of managing around twenty people with MSExcel. So, in a hurry, they developed a dosimetry application with MSAccess.
In order to respect the shutdown of nuclear reactors, which must be as short as possible, Denis therefore developed Webstart in Java. It’s a tool for tracking working hours contextualized to the nuclear subcontracting field.
The last project that was carried out with this customer, was a project to switch all 5 agencies to Linux. All this in 2004, just 10 years after the release of the first Linux kernel and only 20 years after the birth of the GNU project. The project was a success, while satisfying customers.

So, without having changed any equipment, the system was faster, more powerful and above all more reliable. They set up a win98 Remote Desktop Server running win4lin to display a published management application from headquarters. It operated over a simple 64kbps ISDN link. Important processes were ensured (messaging, file sharing, printing, access to management applications, office tools).

Projects multiplied

In the meantime, the skill and perseverance of the Cardon brothers had been spotted at the parent company. The latter was in the process of consolidating the accounting of its 8 subsidiaries in its SAP (innovative business management software).
Thus, in 2 and a half months, Denis succeeded in the challenge of setting up a PHP mill adapted to accept the export formats of the 8 different software packages, as requested by the head office. In an iterative process, the accountants corrected until they had no more errors. In this way, the files were injected into SAP after the annual accounting close for each subsidiary, without a single error.

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The success of this project aroused the interest of the group’s management controllers, who were using MSExcel files with formulas and macros all over the place. They no longer understood their tables. Denis then proposed a very simple and formidably effective method similar to that used previously. As a result, an unreliable, laborious process that used to take several hours to calculate with Excel now takes 5 minutes. All without effort and with extreme reliability.

La CCI de Saumur

Then, in 2005, the CCI de Saumur decided to completely overhaul its IT infrastructure. Denis and Vincent responded to this invitation to tender, which was more ambitious than previous projects, and they were selected.
Tranquil IT modernized the IT infrastructure:
– mail server modification
– shared file server centralization
– creation of unified identity, password management with Samba3-NT4
– monitoring system
– remote backup server

The Saumur CCI had equipped itself better and proportionally for much less than other surrounding CCIs. This project with the Saumur CCI was very structuring for Tranquil IT, as it enabled Vincent and Denis to realize that the system corresponded perfectly to their engineering minds.

The Saumur CCI was better equipped and proportionally much cheaper than other surrounding CCIs.