Today, @mire is represented in both the U.S.A. (Encintas, California) and Europe (Leuven, Belgium). The company concentrates its activities in 2 distinct businesses: DSpace (Institutional Repository) related Solutions and hosted solutions for Online Conference Management.

With Ben Bosman and Mark Diggory on the team, @mire has two of the DSpace committers on board, who actively contribute to the open source development of future versions of DSpace.

Two years after the company was founded, @mire is now a well established name within the industry for academic content management software and services. By keeping a solid strategic focus on tackling research specific challenges with open source repository technology and on continuous innovation, the company now has a unique range of services and products.

In March 2008, @mire launched Tog@ther, an online hosted solution for conference and event management. Built on DSpace repository technology, Tog@ther ensures optimization in both administrative (secretary) workflows, as well as in the academic workflows of paper submission and peer reviewing. As the market responded very enthusiastic to the platform’s innovative features, such as the Form Creator and easy online payment integration, @mire is dedicated to enhance this flagship product even further in 2009.

Numerous repository Add-On Modules were introduced in 2008. The vision behind these modules is the experience that different repository instances have a need for very specific and advanced functionality, depending on their scope and target audience. @mire gathered internal and external best-practices in the areas of Metadata Quality Assurance, Reporting, Digital Preservation, Online access to Audiovisual Media and Images, and continues to implement these practices in highly innovative Repository Add-on Modules.

The first idea to create a company around repository developments, came up in 2004 when Lieven Droogmans and Ben Bosman were conducting their master thesis at the engineering faculty of K.U.Leuven. While other students were attending the graduation ceremony, Lieven and Ben were presenting their findings about repositories and added functionality during the DSpace user group meeting in Cambridge, UK.

After graduating, Lieven collaborated on a project to perform opportunity and requirements analysis for the implementation of a university wide repository system at K.U.Leuven. From early successes with DSpace based prototypes, the support for a repository oriented spinoff company grew steadily.

Meanwhile, Ben started work on a repository project for publishers called PUBELO from within the research group Hypermedia and Databases. This is where he met Bram Luyten, a fellow graduate from 2004, who was at the time working on international e-learning repositories for the CGIAR. During 2005 and 2006, Lieven and Ben both actively participated in the DSpace community and presented their work during the 2006 User Group meeting in Bergen, Norway.

At the end of spring 2006, the team took the plunge and embarked on the mission to create a spinoff company. Together with the aid of SO Kwadraat and Leuven Research and Development the businessplan achieved its critical mass at the end of the summer.

Founded in december 2006, @mire now offers repository services and products. With 6 combined years of DSpace experience, the team has unique competences necessary to fully customize DSpace to an organization's needs. In the coming years, the company aims to stay on top of state-of-the-art repository developments and to further broaden its customer base.