Weinto was founded in 2009 by Nicolas Bages while being in Sydney, Australia. In 2012, after Gobelins, Nicolas added two services such as UX design and web hosting management. These were two high-skill activities closely linked to the solutions he had been delivering for new clients. Hosting management was tied to his skills of running linux servers since 2006.
Later, in 2015, Weinto partnered with other freelancers to add Cybersecurity to its service. During this time, Nicolas acquired knowledge about business structures, functions and processess. Combined with all existing skills and services, Weinto began offering Business Automation services. From re-engeneering to custom designed cross-functions workflows.
During this period Weinto successfully delivered projects to clients like Coca-Cola, Longines, Baccarat. The project were mainly related to marketing campains and data migrations. Weinto would be called by web and marketing agencies in Paris as a sub-contractor. They handled the customer relationship while Weinto would team up with graphic designers, developers, motion artists, creative developers. Most of the recognition was publicly awarded to these agencies though. We won some FWA SOTM, FWA SOTD, Awwward, Lovie Awards.
In 2017, Nicolas moved Weinto to Hong Kong. The natural evolution for Weinto was to provide DevSecOps and cloud management services. The story with Gitlab and Kubernetes started here, managing private clouds for clients and agencies. Later opening the door to consulting services and system architecture services in 2018.
While winning awards was rewarding, most projects had to remain confidential due to NDAs. Furthermore, working on short-term projects lacked alignment with our core values of respect, iteration, and freedom. Marketing campaigns, by nature, have a set end-of-life date before they even begin. While it was gratifying to see our names alongside major corporations, we questioned the ultimate value delivered to the user, as user data was often collected with little to no control.
Nicolas wanted to better serve the user by providing a better chain. What is better than IT for that? IT is everywhere as a support function for every business. How to better serve the business and the user than being strategically placed at their intersection in every single corner?
In 2019, Weinto and a partner built a fully sovereign private cloud platform. The goal was to offer web hosting on a platform we owned, guaranteeing our clients that no third party would have access to their data. We aimed to increase confidentiality and control the infrastructure to offer true reliability and availability. We built a full-stack infrastructure encompassing system administration, APT repo hosting, DNS, mail, Kubernetes clusters, HA storage, NTP servers, GitLab CI/CD, backup and recovery, and observability.
In 2020 Weinto partnered with Wide Agency Switzerland on a project for Lundin Energy. We delivered data migration, a new corporate website, a new private cloud platform for their in-house marketing team. Right when we handed them the keys and started the support and maintenance phase, Lundin Energy was sold to Aker BP and became Orrön Energy. That was a bittersweet moment for us.
If being a subcontractor simplified accesses to larger clients, Weinto was under a strong dependancy. Meanwhile, most of the companies in the EU and in Hong Kong are SMEs or startups. Entities highly exposed to IT risks they aren't equipped to handle. Observing this, Weinto saw the opportunity to have a direct impact on security culture, business automation, architecture and management.
In 2023, Weinto started to offer Enterprise Architecture services and the company moved from the philosophy of "IT + UX" to Business x IT x UX. That is when we started to say:
IT takes business for input and move forwards to enable growth. Experience Design takes the user for input and works backwards to craft solutions with care. Weinto bridges the gap between both worlds by focusing on the common interests protecting privacy & confidentiality.
Business, IT and UX is the best combo to support enterprises with real impact on delivered value. Today, Weinto focuses on the market of SMEs and startups for this reason. Being solo lead architect and strategist maintains Weinto's low operating costs, enabling us to be more accessible. This is a direct benefit for our clients.