Four decades after Roger Miles Holland established the pioneering publishing systems company, Miles 33 is celebrating its 40th anniversary next month.

Holland founded the company in 1976 when he was 33 years old, and saw it pioneer use of the Sun Solaris platform (1988) and launch an Xtension to extend use for QuarkXpress users (1995).

While both of those developments are now history, it has gone on to build an international base of hundreds of customers across six continents. Products cover the mobile, internet, newspaper, magazine, book, directory, radio, TV, credit management and legal industries, with some customers migrating their software from early versions to the latest available.

Chief executive Michael Moore says a track record of successful installations, an innovative licensing model, a diversified product portfolio, stable management, rational acquisition strategy and sensible spending philosophy have all contributed to success: "It really is quite simple," he says. "We deliver what we sell, we operate within our budget and we do not buy companies that have competing products - that only confuses or upsets customers."

UK-based Miles opened its US office in 1984, and now has offices in Connecticut and California, USA, Belo Horizonte (Brazil), Milan and Kuala Lumpur.

It introduces an annual license fee model in 1999, and launched Futureproof advertising in 1999. First sales of the former Tera GN4 editorial content management suite began in 2012. Since then it has acquired European mobile technology developer Virtualcom and this year Wave2.