Ten years ago, the Nintendo Wii was gaming’s newest console, Tesla premiered its first car, and Beyoncé was burning up the Billboard charts. Another notable debut? Mirth® Connect. Mirth Connect was born out of a desire to develop an internal integration engine. At first, the Mirth® R&D team only wanted to figure out how to parse HL7 messages. Gerald Bortis, vice president of R&D, said he tried to get access to competitive demo tools, but there was no way to quickly get a demo version to play with. Along with Jacob Brauer, now the director of software engineering for R&D, they decided to build a demo version that solved R&D’s needs. After developing their own HL7 message parser and router, they decided to turn their project into an open source program so any developer working in health IT could use it. On July 18, 2006, version 1.0 of Mirth Connect was posted to Sourceforge, the open source project sharing site. At first, interest in Mirth Connect grew organically through the developers’ presence on Sourceforge and Gerald’s appearances at software development conferences. But Mirth Connect also developed an online following via sites such as StackOverflow because, “You’d be surprised how many people search for ‘HL7 open source integration,’” Gerald said.