West was founded in October 1985 and has since been an independent player in the IT market, with a rich network of cooperating partners. West has grown into a networking company.
In the 1980's, the transition from proprietary systems to open systems such as UNIX was a main focus of attention. We were one of the first IT companies in the Netherlands to have a thorough knowledge of open systems with graphic interfaces, relational databases and network functionality.
| In 1987 the then Sun distributor asked West to write a SunView training course; as a result of which, West went on to create the entire training programme for the Sun technical support team. |
In cooperation with TNO and the software engineering department of TU Delft, West maintained close contact with the various working groups within the European Union that were engaged in the creation of IT standards. West contributed for instance to the definition of the Ada programming environment and was a member of the C++ NGI working group. Knowledge gained through this was applied in the construction of business-critical, reliable and transferable IT systems.
| A few years after the establishment of Sun Microsystens in the Netherlands, West was asked to provide comprehensive second-line support services for all the computer languages available from Sun, for a period of three years; from Ada, Modula-2 and Fortran to Prolog and C. |
The next logical step was to apply the knowledge and experience gained in space aviation projects. West made crucial contributions to a substantial number of ESA projects.
The Internet emerged. West was one of the first to have a presence on the Internet and it claimed a domain name as early as 1991 
west.nl in the .nl top-level domain. During the mid 1990's, use of the Internet and web technology increased rapidly.
| West set up the Internet Connect Centre, which was established in Diemen in 1996 as one of the first website hosting companies in the Netherlands. In just four years, Iconnect built up an impressive client portfolio with famous names such as Nedlloyd, SNS Bank and Albert Heijn. |
West was also one of the first IT companies in the Netherlands to be active in the areas of Internet security, authorisation and authentication, secure managed hosting, and the Java programming language. This resulted in West being the first company in the Netherlands to be accredited as a Sun Authorized Java Centre.
In 1994, West made preparations for what would lead to the establishment of the company Internet Connect Centre in 1995, a joint venture with the non-profit foundation NLnet. As a result of West's many international contacts, we were able to receive first-hand information on how the Internet was developing in England. We used this knowledge to set up a knowledge-building programme 
which enabled us qualify effortlessly for challenging Web-enabling projects a little further down the line. Examples of such projects include the creation of the first home delivery service of Ahold e-commerce ah.nl, the construction of one of the first e-commerce sites otra.nl (Technische Unie) and - last but not least - the realisation of the first Dutch Internet telebanking facility, kasbank.nl (KAS BANK: previously the Kas-associatie). We won the IT-Computable Award 1997 with this last project.
Around the millennium, West concentrated on providing support for the realisation of e-Business programmes and the application of new developments such as XML, web services, content management tools and portal technology. A number of methods and techniques have become widely accepted now and are part of our standard tool/interface repertoire.
West celebrated its 20th anniversary in October 2005. It goes without saying that this was celebrated in suitable style.
Due to the enormous success of applications such as Google Earth, we expect that there will be a huge demand for GIS applications. There are currently many projects with a GIS component in the space aviation sector, as well as the transport and defence sectors. In addition to the current project-related work, West is also working on GIS applications in combination with secure managed hosting and new applications such as research into Galileo services.