Metri was born in 2003 from an idealistic belief. Metri’s founder, Bart de Ruijter, had a clear idea of the value he wanted to provide to the IT world. His vision can be captured in three words: honesty, transparency and absolute independence. IDC acquired Metri in May 2021, and the organization now operates as IDC Metri.
Metri stands for measuring. It is a derivative of the Latin word meteri. Bart de Ruijter (1970), founder and director, was inspired by John de Mol’s Talpa, which means ten in Latin. The reason for the emergence of Metri, therefore, has everything to do with measuring, with data, with benchmarking.
De Ruijter studied corporate law and worked for the large American company Gartner as an account director. During his studies, he experienced, as he says, that everything that seems straight at first sight, turns out to be crooked. He encountered a lot of injustice in the IT world. Parties who sugar-coated things, failed to keep to agreements and customers who became suspicious of suppliers with only one goal: money. De Ruijter decided to take a sabbatical and travelled the world to think about his dream. And that became Metri. He launched an honest business, started from the idea of measuring IT performance in a fact-based way, and to bring parties together.
Just like many other great organizations, the adventure started as a boys’ book. He started the company in 2004 with only a laptop in his attic room. Not much later, De Ruijter rented a small space at the harbor in Aalsmeer. Without borrowing a dime, he pursued his ideal: playing a transparent, honest role in the IT landscape. With a focus on a business area that, according to De Ruijter’s conviction, was unexplored: being able to analyze business cases clearly, thus helping organizations with their own IT and with purchased IT. At first, he did provided only services to customers who were looking for IT solutions, but soon, IT suppliers came to Metri for independent advice.
Metri grew from a one-man business to a company with 35 employees. Yet it has never been the entrepreneur’s ambition to grow significantly. His only motive: help companies with fact-based information to get the best return from every cent invested in IT.
Metri is a small player, but nowadays, the 200 largest information provisioning organizations are among the company’s customers. The company, which is now spaciously housed in a beautiful office building in Schiphol-Rijk, grows a database with an enormous amount of data, enabling the consultants to conclude the best and fairest deals for their customers. De Ruijter himself compares the role of Metri with the one of an independent broker. Customers and suppliers are always willing to share all their data with Metri because they know that it is used entirely anonymously. This way, there is no room for dishonesty and apples are compared with apples.