History and overview
Clyral is a full service web product and consulting firm based out of Hillcrest in South Africa.
The team gets together (2004 – 2005)
Clyral was founded during 2004 by brothers Mark and Pete after they had spent 3 years working on ad-hoc website projects between their studies. Our early focus was on website development and the related design and media services that typical clients were looking for.
In late 2005 Andi and Rohland left corporate jobs in Johannesburg to join Clyral as partners. From the proverbial garage startup, we moved through a few offices in the Hillcrest area (Outside Durban in South Africa) as our team grew to cope with increasing demand.
We focus our efforts (2006 – 2007)
Over the next few years we worked on various types of projects and realised that our interests and skills lay in the creation of advanced web based applications. In 2006 we began phasing out our website design services to specialise more in software development with the web as our platform of choice.
As well as our consulting and development services, we were bootstrapping the creation of software products we had dreamed of ourselves. In 2006 we launched our first self-funded product, Mobile Researcher, which is a system that allows standard mobile phones to be used for remote data collection.
We have worked with many different technologies and in different industries, taking what is usually just an idea for a software system and seeing it through to design and implementation.
We tweak our approach (2008 – 2009)
We had always shown interest in the many approaches to software development, looking into different methodologies for project management, coding practices, user experience design and how we could improve communication internally and with our customers. In 2008 we started formalising our habits by adopting Scrum as a lightweight agile project management methodology. We continue to evolve our design, billing and communication processes to align ourselves as partners with our clients so that together we can react quickly to issues and opportunities.
What we value
Early in 2009 we put some time aside to revisit the values of the company so that these ideas could be communicated to prospective clients, fostered within our team, and drive the decisions we make for the business. We think the following ideas portray the values we hold high as a company.
| Creativity Be bold and engineer new ideas. Challenge conventional wisdom. |
Exploration Learn, discover and innovate. Push boundaries. |
| Leadership Earn a reputation for strategic and ethical leadership. Be a role model. |
Excellence Utilise and foster best practice in all you do. No Hacks. |
| Balance Temper growth with a responsible and sustainable approach. Strive to build win-win opportunities. |
Accountability Be transparent and cultivate trust in all relationships. Don’t pass the buck. |
About the Name
Over the years many people have asked about the origin of our name. We extracted the following text from Mark’s blog to let him explain where the name came from:
Contrary to what most people assume, there is no witty formulae from which the name ‘Clyral’ was derived. No, we did not combine letters from our names with star signs or mothers birth dates. At the end of the day we wanted to register a short punchy dot com website domain that matched our company name. Unfortunately almost every word in the English dictionary was already registered by 2004, together with millions of combinations, many of which we tried to register. Although this limitation was real, the company was very much about creativity, and it seemed fit to create a totally new sounding word that we could own and could be our identity.
The name Clyral was inspired by two science fiction character names; ‘Kal-El’ (Supermans birth name on Kryptonite) and ‘Klorel’ (An alien character from the Stargate SG1 TV series). If you are a Stargate fan, or bother investigating, please ignore the fact that Klorel was an evil parasitic alien. There is intentionally no inherent meaning in the name Clyral other than what we imply through who we are as a company. If you desire some significance in the name, we would rather borrow more noble virtues from the character of Superman.
We are fascinated by the many variations on the pronunciation that constantly emerge, especially considering the diverse languages and accents we are exposed to in South African call centers. Clyral is correctly pronounced klahy-ral (kla?’ ræl).
Organisations we work with
We’ve had the honour and pleasure to work with some of the most dynamic and well respected organisations in South Africa and further afield.
