- SilverPlatter
SilverPlatter Information, Inc. was one of the first companies to produce commercial CD-ROMs. It was founded in 1984 by Bela Hatvany and Walt Winshall with the explicit intention of using CD technology to publish data. Ron Rietdyk was the company's first President; it was he, with Jane Niemi, who launched the company in the United States in 1986 from a small building in Newton Lower Falls, Massachusetts.
The company began experimenting with 4 files - ERIC, LISA, PSYCLit, and
EMBASE . In 1987 the company had 12 databases and revenues of approximately $6m. Competing with CD Plus (nowOvid Technologies ), Aries, Cambridge Scientific Abstracts, Dialog, the company offered libraries a wide range of CD-ROMs. Over the next few year the company grew quickly, expanding from its academic base into medical, business and health and safety CD publishing.In 1989 SilverPlatter launched MultiPlatter, a system for networking CD-ROMs across LANs, followed in 1991 by ERL (the electronic reference library) a system for providing hard disk access to its databases via the DXP protocol. This last proved successful with more than 500 sites using the technology by 1997. In that year the company had grown to $75m in revenues and had over 250 databases.
In 2001 SilverPlatter was sold to
Wolters Kluwer at a reputed price of $113m, and now forms part of Ovid Technologies, the Wolters Kluwer subsidiary.External reference
[http://www.ovid.com/site/products/tools/silverplatter/access_tools.jsp?top=2&mid=3&bottom=8&subsection=15 The SilverPlatter Platform] company site
[http://www.ovid.com/site/about/history.jsp?top=42&mid=43 Company History] of Ovid, with information on merger with SilverPlatter
Wikimedia Foundation. 2010.
