Asked to explain his company in February 2022, Ali Athar began by offering to play a video. Three customers would explain what itim had done for them. For a software founder, it was a revealing choice of opening act. The product could wait its turn. First, the people paying for it would have the floor.
There is a useful way into Athar’s working life in that small exchange. His career has taken him from IBM databases to systems integration, through retail consulting and into running an AIM-listed software business. Across those changes, the subject keeps returning to the ordinary business of shops: what they hold, what they sell and how their separate operations fit together.
His proposition gives the familiar high-street branch another job. A store can serve the person standing at the counter and the person ordering nearby on a phone. Its stock can support collection or local dispatch. Its staff can bring their knowledge into a relationship that continues online. The shop window, in this account, has acquired a second opening.
The appeal is practical. Retailers have already paid for buildings, inventory and employees. Getting those assets to work together sounds straightforward until a website, a till and a stock system each offer a slightly different version of events. A customer can forgive a great many things. Being invited to buy something that has quietly disappeared is rarely among them.
Five years with the databases
Athar graduated from Cambridge University and joined IBM, where he spent five years as a database specialist. In 1982 he started Inforem, a systems design and integration company with a strong retail focus. After CSC acquired that business, he spent two years there as a director. His route into entrepreneurship therefore ran through the machinery underneath an organisation.
Itim followed in 1993, initially as a consulting business. Athar worked on business transformation with retailers and other established operators, including Woolworths, Booker, Burger King, Marks & Spencer, Homebase and B&Q. The variety matters. Selling food, clothing, household goods and trade supplies presents different daily problems, even when the management language sounds reassuringly similar.
Consulting placed him near decisions about how businesses should operate. Software would give the company a different way to carry those decisions into everyday work. Itim began moving into proprietary technology in 1999; by 2004 it was focused exclusively on digital technology. The transition took years, a detail easily lost when a company’s history is compressed into a founding date.
That sequence is the backbone of his story. The consultant did not arrive after the software to explain it. The consulting came first. It gives a particular context to itim’s later emphasis on business processes: changing the system was always connected to changing how the retailer worked, rather than simply installing another application and hoping for a tidier Monday.
A shelf has a postcode
By 2012, Athar was publicly considering a problem that shopping websites still make familiar: how to show an entire range as convincingly as a physical store. In a discussion of cross-channel retailing, he described how carefully shops arranged products to entice people to browse. The digital version needed thought about merchandising as well as the mechanics of a transaction.
A decade later, his explanation had broadened to the store network itself. In his 2022 interview, he described stores as “really an asset”. Stock held near a customer could help a retailer offer collection or dispatch from a branch. The geography was already there; making it useful required the information and ordering systems to cooperate.
That idea has an appealing lack of glamour. It asks a retailer to look again at shelves, local teams and existing customer relationships. A delivery promise begins somewhere physical. However elegant the checkout page, a product must eventually leave a shelf. Athar’s work concerns the awkward stretch between the attractive promise on a screen and the actual item in somebody’s hands.
He was also selling to businesses with existing systems and established habits. In 2022 he described customers using different parts of itim’s offering, from invoice matching to stock and pricing tools or store systems. The range suggests why his explanation began with customer testimony: the phrase retail software can conceal quite different jobs, budgets and reasons to buy.
“We are retail people first”itim’s CEO statement, September 2026
A wine shop puts the idea to work
Majestic Wine offers a concrete expression of the approach. Its Shop Local service, built on itim’s Unify platform, allows customers to browse and buy live stock from a nearby store. The published project account says Shop Local represented one in three online orders within 18 months. This is a share of online orders, a specific result for a specific service.
The attraction is easy to picture without inventing a customer testimonial. Someone choosing wine can discover what a local branch actually holds before ordering. The branch’s assortment becomes visible beyond the pavement. Local store teams remain involved in the customer relationship. The technology connects activities that a shopper might reasonably assume were connected already.
A second Majestic project addressed its commercial customers. A B2B portal replaced manual, telephone-based ordering with a digital self-service system for more than 3,000 commercial clients. Stock visibility, financial reconciliation and account control across multiple locations belong to that less photogenic side of retail. A purchase can be delightful; reconciling it still needs doing.
The two projects earned itim and Majestic three Retail Systems Awards in 2025: Online Innovation of the Year, Technology Project of the Year and Omnichannel Solution of the Year. These were shared project awards. They give Athar’s broader argument an example with actual users, rather than leaving the entire proposition suspended in a presentation about the future.
The long road to a stock-market morning
On 28 June 2021, itim joined London’s AIM market. It raised £8 million before expenses at 154 pence a share, with a market capitalisation at admission of £48.1 million. The intended uses included software development, marketing, international expansion, acquisition opportunities and repayment of £2.1 million connected with the EDI Plus acquisition.
For Athar, the flotation arrived 28 years after he established itim. That is an unusually useful interval to keep in mind when reading the word founder. It encompasses a consulting business, a move into software and the assembly and redevelopment of acquired retail applications. By the time public shareholders arrived, the business had already lived through several chapters.
The people around him also reflected the meeting of retail and technology. In 2022 he discussed a board including former Sainsbury’s chief executive Justin King and then-chairman Michael Jackson, formerly chairman of Sage. Those were the connections he chose to emphasise when explaining how the company understood its market and reached decision-makers.
In May 2024, appearing alongside CFO Ian Hayes, Athar described the release of the UNIFY platform and a customer base of about 80 core customers in Britain and internationally. His account of growth was grounded in existing relationships: broaden the platform, manage accounts carefully and demonstrate the effect through case studies. It was a sales approach built around work already done.
When your customers have a difficult year
The recent record adds friction to the story. In the first half of 2025, itim described retailers delaying projects that required substantial commitments. The software supplier’s prospects were tied to the willingness of shop operators to invest, even when those operators could see a case for greater efficiency. A convincing argument does not automatically produce an immediate signature.
For 2025 as a whole, the group reported a £464,000 loss before tax. The administration of customer Quiz Clothing in early 2026 resulted in a write-off affecting those results. The business also reduced its cost base by more than £1 million in the second half of 2025, with the effects expected in 2026. Longstanding customer relationships carried commercial exposure alongside opportunity.
The six months to June 2026 brought a return to profit before tax, reported at £0.2 million on revenue of £8.6 million. Booked recurring revenue was £7.4 million, or 86% of revenue. These are company results for a half-year, rather than a verdict on Athar’s entire career. They show the current operating task behind the founder’s larger argument.
In September, he highlighted support from existing customers and stronger performance in South America. His attention was still on converting interest into business. That is the quieter recurring action in the story: maintaining relationships while persuading the next retailer that the disruption and cost of a change will be worth accepting.
Teaching the next system to speak retail
Itim’s 2026 launch of itimAIQ extends the story into artificial intelligence. The company describes a retail context layer designed to connect retailers’ systems with large language models. The proposition is that useful automation needs the vocabulary and relationships of the business, alongside the underlying model. Stock, pricing and customer information have to mean something consistent.
There is continuity here with the database specialist’s earlier work. Each generation of technology creates another way to process information, and another reason to ask whether the information describes the business properly. AI makes that question fashionable. Athar’s career gives it a longer history, stretching back through integration projects and the consulting work that preceded his software company.
The next test is commercial and operational: whether retailers adopt the tools, put them to work and obtain results they value. Athar is still making his case through the shops and customers he has spent decades serving. Somewhere in that argument sits an ordinary shelf, holding an ordinary product, waiting for the various systems around it to agree.