Overview
Fotango was a London-based online photo services company, a subsidiary of Canon Europe, where Simon Wardley served in a senior leadership role for approximately seven years (c. 2000-2007). His exact title is inconsistent across sources — The Register referred to him as COO in 2007, while other sources say CEO or acting CEO. He helped steer Fotango from near-bankruptcy to profitability. It is where Wardley developed the mapping technique that would become Wardley Mapping, and where the company built Zimki — one of the first public platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offerings.
The Origin of Mapping
Wardley has described the genesis of mapping as arising from frustration. As head of Fotango, he needed to make strategic decisions about the company's direction but found that conventional strategy tools — SWOT analysis, Porter's Five Forces, business model canvases — did not provide what he needed: a visual representation of the competitive landscape that showed position and movement.
His insight was that strategy needed something analogous to a geographic map: a representation with position (where things are relative to each other) and movement (how things change over time). He began experimenting with plotting the company's value chain against the evolutionary maturity of each component, eventually developing the framework that bears his name.
Zimki
Fotango developed Zimki (initially called "libapi" — liberation API), a JavaScript-based platform-as-a-service. Zimki had a beta launch in March 2006 and a public launch at EuroOSCON 2006. It allowed developers to create entire applications (client and server side) in JavaScript on a hosted utility computing platform — the first public PaaS, roughly contemporary with early AWS services.
Wardley used his mapping framework to anticipate that computing infrastructure was evolving toward commodity/utility provision. Zimki was an attempt to act on this strategic insight.
The OSCON Resignation and Shutdown
Wardley had planned to announce Zimki's open-sourcing (under GPL v3) at OSCON in July 2007. When Canon's board blocked the open-source release, Wardley resigned on stage during his keynote, declaring it his "last talk for Fotango." He argued that utility computing required open standards. Canon ceased all funding of Fotango within days. Zimki was shut down on Christmas Eve 2007.
For Wardley, this experience illustrated a key theme of his framework: inertia — the resistance of incumbent organizations to the evolutionary movement of components. Canon's board could not see the strategic value of utility computing because it did not fit their existing mental model of the business.
The Fotango experience became a formative case study in Wardley's subsequent work, demonstrating both the power of mapping (correctly anticipating the cloud computing shift) and the limits of insight without institutional support (being unable to act on the insight due to organizational inertia).