IMA online: twenty years of history

It’s been exactly 20 years since the IMA Group published its first website. That was on 22 January 1997, and IMA had just registered with the competent authorities the geographical domain that was normally assigned to Italian companies: www.ima.it.

20 years later, IMA has become an international reality with production companies and agencies in more than 80 countries; and despite this, the Group can still be reached on the web by keying in the same address where its online adventure began.

Twenty years online have been the best way for IMA to open up to the outside world, as it is a company that decided that it can be visited firstly by its customers, then by those involved in the stock market, given that IMA is listed and open to market judgement.

Over the years, IMA has also told the world about the values of an Italian district, which we call “Packaging Valley“, where it was born, and where it has managed to stand out over time. IMA wants to maintain this role through growth, which means new technologies, innovation and even more reliable products and services, being well aware that there is nothing automatic about industry leadership: it has to be earned over and over again.

1997 was the start of the web and a new era was dawning. Businesses and people took their first steps in this new world, whose paradigms were still to be discovered. We saw the birth of the first websites and the first online forums, the digital equivalent of the agorà where the ancient Greeks used to meet for a chat.

Not very different from what is happening today on the web, which has made real-time interaction its strong point, allowing people to exchange products, services and information without any space or time constraints. A genuine habitat with its own rules, its own forms of expression and relationship, which are constantly evolving.

So in designing its new website, IMA wanted to take a step further. It has chosen to be online in a way that, in the past, was proof of being offline: an integrated and virtuous ecosystem.

IMA’s web ecosystem will be populated by a community made up of ideas, products and services, especially people in continuous interaction.

IMA’s new website has been designed and developed in the evolutionary era of IMA Digital, which we presented at Interpack 2017, the idea being to be more open to the outside world, to the needs of the markets, with the most advanced tools used by the information society.

This in order to be more equipped to listen to the needs of our end-users and to customise products so as to meet them, with the maximum cyber security.

With the new website, we also want to allow anyone who invests in IMA to make a journey into the Company’s innovative spaces and ideas, knowing the people, the prime actors of our success and above all the ones that appreciate us.

I would like to conclude by saying that launching a new website with Corporate content and Businesses in many different sectors is undoubtedly an ambitious challenge, but one that is feasible if we are open to criticism and advice on how we can improve.

Do not hesitate to send your suggestions, assessments and critiques to my personal e-mail address, so that I can exercise my management functions in the best way possible, using what I consider to be an instrument that allows us to show IMA’s face to the world.

In fact, we are really only at the beginning of another long process.

Thank you,

Alberto Vacchi