Our Story

Our company grew from a conversation in 1994 between our founder and CEO, Gary Saner, and his neighbor Mike. Knowing that Gary was the head of R&D for a major software development firm in San Diego, Mike sought Gary’s advice about an ongoing software development project that he had commissioned for his company. Mike was the President of a travel franchise company, and they had hired a software development company to create a custom software application to help them run their business. Mike needed a trusted opinion on the progress of the software, and Gary offered to take a look.

To make a long story short, it ends up that the project was in terrible shape. It was overdue, over-budget and nothing near production quality. After ensuing conversations, Mike convinced Gary to build a team and redo the entire project. Gary, with the help of some of his trusted colleagues, worked nights and weekends for 6 months and produced a finished product. The product was a huge success. Gary and his two partners went on to found Prosoft, Inc. (subsequently renamed as Primero Systems Inc.) as a full-time concern that same year.

Nobody knew it then, but the circumstances surrounding the founding of Primero Systems would set the tone for our company’s future. Our company was founded on relationships and trust, and we’ve continued to build it upon those same principals ever since. We don’t look to make a quick buck where we can get it and move on. We look to build long-lasting relationships that are built upon our core values of honesty, integrity, reliability and commitment to innovation. We need to look no further than our own customer history to see how those core values have manifested themselves over and over again.

So, you may wonder, whatever became of that initial application we created? Well, over the last couple of decades, that first travel company client has grown and flourished and been acquired a number of times. Each acquisition or merger became another opportunity for Primero to introduce ourselves to a new group of people and prove our value all over again. Today, that travel franchise belongs to the largest travel agency franchisor in North America. That application we built, has not only survived the various mergers and transitions, but indeed it has thrived. To this day, the current version of that application we built, has not only survived the various mergers and transitions, but it has also thrived.

Similarly, over 20 years ago, we were introduced to another company that needed a new product to do quality assurance for diagnostic analyzers. This company, in turn, introduced us to Michael, who worked at a firm that creates linearity and calibration verification products. Around 2003, we built and deployed a web-based quality control monitoring application for Michael at his new company. Eventually, that company was purchased by a multinational biotechnology product development company, with revenues of more than $20 billion and approximately 65,000 employees globally.

Situations like this can often “toll the death knell” for products like ours. Instead, it became the driving force for significant product expansion and user adoption. The product has since been rebranded by the new company, and we continue to support and grow it as we grow our relationship with them.

Michael, in the meantime, moved on from this company and has continued to engage with us over this past decade-plus. As COO of his next employer, Michael commissioned us to do some consulting and development work there. Currently, he is an executive of a company that manufactures and sells linearity and calibration verification kits for human diagnostic analyzers. We’re creating a brand-new, cutting-edge, web-based platform to support their quality assurance operations.

So…are we starting to see a trend here yet? We aim to create meaningful and lasting relationships with people. Through our core values of honesty, integrity, reliability and commitment to innovation, we strive to make sure those relationships blossom over the decades.

Allow us to share one more example with you. Through yet another tangled web of friends and acquaintances, we were referred to do some work for a San Diego based defense contractor, under the guidance of Diane who was their Manager of Technical Publications and Provisioning. Diane eventually moved on and became the Principal Solutions Architect for one of the largest drug testing and medication monitoring laboratories in the nation. It didn’t take Diane long to realize that she was going to need some serious help at her new company.

Diane gave us a call and laid out the challenge before us. Her new company was using an aging laboratory information system (LIS) that couldn’t keep up with the rate at which the company was growing. The existing system crashed often, and its output was unreliable. That was over 11 years ago. Today, we can proudly say that we’ve built an entire LIS from scratch to meet the very specific needs of their business and to support their significant transactional volume. We are honored to have earned a lasting partnership with this company as we continue to improve and enhance the LIS and related systems.

The Future is Bright

Who knows where the next 25 years will take us, but if the past is any indication, I think it’s safe to say that it will be built upon the foundation of relationships, honesty, integrity, reliability and commitment to innovation. We are genuinely not interested in just banging out code for a one-off project. We are looking to help a company achieve its long-term vision through the intelligent use of technology.  A company that shares our values and core principals and looks to build a lasting relationship from which all can benefit.