History
helpIT systems was founded by Steve Tootill in 1991, following his experience running the IT department at Family Assurance Society in the UK. Here, he realized that there were no reasonably priced deduplication packages available that would make use of all the data that a company held about its customers. Steve wrote the initial version of matchIT as a packaged software product, with Prudential Life of Ireland committed to using matchIT as soon as it became available. Steve's father Geoff, a skilled linguist and classics scholar, designed the uniquely effective phonetic algorithm, soundIT, which powers much of the fuzzy matching in our software. Geoff Tootill was one of the leading architects of the world's first real computer, the Manchester University "Baby", which first ran in June 1948 - this was the first "stored program" computer, i.e. one that could be programmed to perform different tasks. In April 2005, the University acknowledged Geoff Tootill's pioneering work by naming its newly refurbished teaching laboratories in his honour.
Since those early days, matchIT and the core fuzzy matching component, findIT, have evolved significantly due to many man-years of development effort by an extremely able team, resulting in the current highly functional yet user-friendly systems.