It was a new millennium which apparently meant it was time for TSI Software to adopt a new identity. Let's face it, "TSI Software" wasn't the greatest name. There were many employees who didn't know what "TSI" even stood for (it was "Turnkey Systems Inc" by the way). So the company decided to rename itself after its flagship integration package – Mercator Software.
"Mercator Software: The A2A, B2B, B2C eBusiness Integration Company" was the full name announced that harshly cold day in Chicagoland. For anyone unfamiliar with short-lived buzz-acronyms they stand for "application to application", "business to business", and "business to consumer" respectively. That subtitle would be quietly dropped later.
Rebranding meant emptying the supply closet of anything with the TSI logo on it. All the TSI coffee mugs stacked in the kitchen also had to go, I grabbed a few and keep one on my office desk to this day.
Despite the free office supplies, this lowered the morale of our location quite a bit. In all the press releases and marketing material there was nary a mention of anything our office supported. We always knew the EDI products were the b-team of TSI, like the Macintosh team at Microsoft. Still, we produced a line that was profitable and had several huge accounts. Rumors started that they were going to sell our branch of the company or turn it into a maintenance only shop.
In reality they simply saw the EDI line as having little growth potential. Enterprise application integration (EAI) was going to carry the company to new heights. It was a fairly open playing field in 2000. In addition to Mercator there was SeeBeyond, Vitria, webMethods, Tibco, and CrossWorlds fighting for a piece of the pie. Only Vitria and Tibco still exist as independent companies today.
Another source of angst was the delay of Trading Partner Workgroup. We were done and ready to ship but had to wait until we received the new logos, splash pages, and icons. "Go ahead and fix a few more bugs or something" were our instructions for coping. The problem was, we didn't have any bugs that we thought could be fixed in the anticipated 1-2 week delay. If only we knew the delay was months instead of weeks.
Instead I wrote my first, and to date only, Easter Egg. I decided to have a little fun with the rebranding by hiding a pong clone with the text "Mercator Software: The P2P (paddle to paddle) eBusiness Integration Company" in the title bar. It was a one-player game with some rudimentary computer AI and adjustable speed. Not too shabby for an afternoon's work. It can be accessed in the user administration screen by holding the CTRL key while clicking on a specific component and dragging it to reveal a pong icon.