The origins of our products can be found back in 1993

While searching for a good quality and easily financed archiving solution, the future founder of the company realised in 1993 that the solutions on offer were either of inferior quality or were too expensive to allow a classic SME to finance the procurement.

It was first intended to be just a tool for adding key words to scanned documents, but it developed into an application that could already be seen to be related to today’s RichClient product. During this period a great deal of useful experience was also accumulated, which later characterised the company’s philosophy.

The company Archivista GmbH was founded in March 1998 in Zurich. A multitude of products and services have since then joined the real flagship product – the Archivista software. Already in 1999 an English language version of Archivista was released. In the year 2000 we were one of the first European companies to make a commitment to open source databases for our products.

In mid-2003 the development of a brand new product, the ArchivistaBox, was initiated. At the 2005 Linux Day we presented the ArchivistaBox to the public for the first time, and since then the ArchivistaBox has continually undergone further development. The basis of the ArchivistaBox is formed by development with the GPL open source licence.

The company moved into new premises in Pfaffhausen in 2007. In 2008, in addition to the archiving and the DMS component, a new ERP component was installed in the ArchivistaBox. A server virtualisation platform – ArchivistaVM – appeared in 2009. In 2010, all ArchivistaBoxes were produced as 64-bit versions. One year later, Archivista GmbH won the Special Prize category of the CH Open Source Award.

In 2012, all ArchivistaBox versions were produced in RAM mode, i.e. with the entire software running exclusively in the main memory. This enabled a significant increase in speed. The Albis III scan station appeared in 2013; the scan box still weighed less than 100 grammes, but was able to process up to 200 pages per minute. Archivista GmbH moved into new premises in Egg, as the owners acquired a property there in 2013.

From 2014, development will increasingly be geared towards solutions that can be scaled across multiple computers. Whether in virtualization or text recognition, a network of computers (cluster) offers an unprecedented level of performance.

To mark the company’s 20th anniversary, the open source Linux distribution AVMultimedia is released, which offers convenient working in all aspects of sound and film processing. The ArchivistaBox 2019/XI is the first release based on AVMultimedia. ArchivistaDMS thus offers the possibility of processing all audiovisual formats. In its basic version, the ArchivistaBox can process data volumes of up to 200 TByte.

In 2021, speech recognition will be integrated, in 2022 both ArchivistaERP and ArchivistaDMS will be equipped with a new QR code solution, in 2023 a new technology for scaling in the optimization of video files will be introduced and in 2024 every ArchivistaBox can be upgraded to an Internet-capable ArchivistaBox (without any adjustments to the firewall). Even after more than 25 years of company history, the ArchivistaBox continues to be developed, now exclusively in Switzerland for more than 12 years.

Archivista’s customers primarily come from Switzerland (60%) and other German-speaking areas (30%). The remaining 10% of the firm’s customers are found in locations covering most of the globe. Italian and French versions of ArchivistaBox have been available since 2008. These figures do not include the well over 120,000 downloads of ArchivistaBox Community or AVMultimedia worldwide.