In 2011, Stephen’s son, Jon Ruby joined the business. Jon had worked at Jonar as a teenager, gaining an understanding of the ERP industry. Over 20 years, he went on to build and grow a number of small businesses before coming back to Montreal to help his father figure out the future of Jonar.
Jon quickly determined that there wasn’t much of a future for locally hosted, Windows-based, niche constrained, traditional ERP systems. So together, Jon and Stephen decided to entertain an odd but interesting notion: could ERP be completely re-imagined to take advantage of the latest ideas and technologies to provide a solution with the features and functionality of traditional systems but easier, faster and cheaper?
It was an ambitious idea but they agreed to try. Jon spent most of a year designing a brand new approach to ERP. But turning this new approach into reality proved challenging - the best engineers told them that what they wanted to build could not be built.
That's when necessity gave birth to invention. Jonar had to devise a new type of team to build this new type of software.
More than ten years later, ParagonERP is that revolutionary system and the team that built it is as much, if not more of, a revelation.