5 Years of Sly

The founding story

Let’s take a look five years back, when Sly GmbH was founded on the 27th of January 2017 by four experienced specialists. Ten months later, Sly found a suitable den and moved to its new office in Zürich Oerlikon, near the train station.

With the new office, the client base also has extended and with it the team has grown by additional ecommerce developers. Well known companies such as Angst + Pfister, Belimo, OPO Oeschger and Migros joins to the client base corroborate the following success story of the young company.

After the impressive start in 2017 the successes lined up and the team grew constantly to fulfill the demand of customers. Even though it is a challenge to find enough good developers in Switzerland, Sly early committed to Swissness and still does until today.

The main reason is Slys belief, to provide better quality and customer service, if the whole team is close to the customer and no additional language, or cultural barriers exist.

TecHUB Swiss

As anyone reading this probably knows, to find specialists for ecommerce development is difficult. Especially if you commit to Swissness and want to deliver the highest quality possible. To always find the right partners for a project at hand is hard. Not surprisingly, the founders of Sly were not alone with this issue but had a plan. They connected with other IT experts in the region Zürich and founded TechHUB Swiss in summer 2020. The motivation behind TecHUB is to extend the network of trusted partners and allow each member to focus on their core strength rather than having to staff every upcoming project alone.

TecHUB Swiss acts as a network platform for small IT-companies, startups and freelancers with the goal to connect IT-specialists out of different fields.

If you feel addressed, do not hesitate to get in contact with us. More informations about TecHUB Swiss is available at https://techub.swiss/

VELOX - The Open-Source Headless Ecommerce Foundation

Since the project staffing issue is reduced, there is now space for other ideas. Over the years, Sly accompanied many big ecommerce projects and the monolithic ecommerce systems were getting more and more complex. Most of them were standard solutions which had to be customized with huge costs for development and licenses. The team at Sly was thrilled to develop a solution without all this, often not needed complexity and license costs. With their more than 20 years experience of building B2B ecommerce solutions, they certainly knew about the everyday struggles of building webshops and the effort needed to build one from scratch.

As Covid in 2020 shuts down many companies in Switzerland, it also led to some of the upcoming projects of Sly being stopped. Instead of introducing short-time, Sly took the chance and started VELOX.

VELOX is the world's first open source headless ecommerce foundation based on microservice architecture. It takes the best of breed approach and follows microservice best practices. Meaning, we build core features in microservices which are loosely connected and allow enrichments and modification however needed to fulfill the customers needs. With VELOX it is possible to build an ecommerce solution, with much reduced development efforts needed, compared to a tailor made solution and no license cost as in a standard solution. In addition each VELOX project starts with much less unused code, which still needs to be maintained, compared to a project built using a standard solution.

After the first release in March 2021, the VELOX team is looking forward to presenting to you the next major release in Q2 2022 with powerful new functionalities and features.
More information can be found at: https://www.velox.swiss/

Sly Connect

There is another exciting story of a game changing product made by Sly. Together with the CEO of APSOparts, Ralf Werder, who had the initial idea, Sly developed a Software-as-a-Service solution to digitalize the order process of large and small companies.

The developed solution, called Sly Connect, applies a parsing algorithm to transform structured documents into orders. The algorithm detects repeating patterns in your documents and stores them. This makes it much faster to place an order in the webshop. With Sly Connect it is possible for a company of any size to digitize their order processes without costly EDI or e-procurement integrations. Powerful enterprise features like scanner or mail integration complement the use case of Sly Connect.

This easy solution is also available for your webshop. It can be integrated with only a few lines of code. This and it’s complete independence to existing architecture, makes it very simple to integrate Sly connect into an existing webshop. Every webshop can profit from digitalization just by integrating this innovative solution. You can find out more about Sly Connect on the website: www.sly.ch/sly-connect

Sly’s Companions

Even though we founded Sly just five years ago, many of our customer relationships reach back way longer - over 20 years! We would like to thank our first Sly customers for the long-term relationship and the trust, especially in the early days of Sly. Thanks for many years of business to APSOparts, OPO, Ferax and Distelec!

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APSOparts

Sly Connect was just the last of many innovative projects we could implement together with APSOparts during the last 16 years. We are looking back to a successful collaboration since APSOparts and Angst + Pfister supported us as our first customer. Literally since the first days when Sly GmbH was founded.

Distrelec

We can proclaim another success story with Distrelec. Sly and Distrelec have been working together since the founding of Sly as well. Many successful projects have been performed with various team sizes since 1998.

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Ferax

With Ferax we also have been working together since our first day. In the beginning of Sly we continued to develop their product “Frappe” to a Software-as-a-Service with the name “claudit”. With claudit the audit process can be standardized and optimized. Until today, Sly takes care that “claudit”, and since last year also “account-iT”, work reliably at all times.

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OPO

An additional long-term customer of ours is OPO Oeschger. Since 2002 we have been part of their ecommerce journey in one way or another. From implementing a complete new webshop to consulting in very particular aspects of the webshop - we are proud to be part of their online success story.

If you want to be part of our success story and want to benefit from our long-term experience in ecommerce, get in touch with us.

See you soon!