The story behind Regent Instruments Inc.
Regent Instruments Inc. was founded by Régent Guay in 1991 in Québec Canada and is still the owner today.
Before founding the company, Regent Guay was a post graduate student at Laval University's Vision Laboratory under the supervision of Dr. Denis Poussart, in collaboration with Dr. Jean Poliquin of Wood Science department. The result of his thesis, after years of continuing research and development, became the WinCELL software.
Regent then went to work for National Optics Institue (NOI) which was a new research center. At NOI, Dr. Pierre Lavigne and Russell Boulay were among those who helped Regent's projects to come. There he met with Dr. Réjean Gagnon and Hubert Morin from Universite du Québec à Chicoutimi (UQAC) with whom the WinDENDRO system was designed. Jean Côté, an intern at NOI did some reasearch work in this design.
Some years after, Regent left NOI to start Regent Instruments Inc. while there were talks for creating WinFOLIA with Dr. Gregor Aas in Switzerland. The latter agreed to do the project with the new company. At that time it was unclear which products the company would make and sell (will it concentrate on forestry instruments or more categories?). That is why a generic name was chosen for the company.
After some time, Dr. Christian Messier of Universite du Quebec à Montreal (UQAM) approached the company to design what later became WinRHIZO. Jean-Luc Arseneault contributed a lot to this and other Regent Instruments' products. A large part of his work is still in use in today's products. Stephan Pouleur and Guillaume Coté were great contributors in testing and presenting WinRHIZO at scientific meetings and exhibits. Frederic Jean later did some R&D work. Root diameter interpolation is one of his achievements. Christian Largarde under supervision of André Zaccarin (Vision Laboratory at Laval University) did the pale root detection still in use today. Steve Vallerand did heavy R&D stuff and code optimisation used in a few products (ring detection, roots in soil detection, color analysis, canopy analysis...). Marc Samson contributed to R&D and various programmation tasks for different products.
While Regent Guay worked in part in administering the company, his dominant and preferred work was in designing the technical products in collaboration with its engineers.
Then company was later approached by MERQ to design WinSCANOPY. The original prototype O-Mount was designed by Sean Doric of Doric Lenses and later refined and made into production by Jean McCarthy. The North Finder was from Robert Plante, a physic engineer working in its own company. The "O-Mount" name came from the fact that its shape was round, in contrast to the square shape of the competition at the time.
WinRHIZO Tron was initially in WinRHIZO Pro for measurements of roots in soil manually. As the number of features and commands grew, it became a separate product of its own. The same happened to WinSEEDLE, which initially was part of WinFOLIA.
WinCAM was the result of taking WinRHIZO 's color analysis and WinCELL 's morphology to create a more versatile product to analyse various objects.
XL products (XLRhizo, XLFolia...) were done by different people over the years. Mario Mercier did major works until Alexandre Dery took over until today. Alexandre also contributed to technical redactions and products testing. He is also the genius behind Regent Instruments interactive price list.
The following people also contributed to Regent's success over the years:
Dr. Christine Fortin for 35 years at the administration, accounting and advertising among other.
Diane Garant for 23 years at the sales department. She also did documents translations and maintaining the web site among other.
Remy Alain, Samuel Drouin and Nathalie Bergeron for respectively 12, 6 and 2 years at the production department.
Michel Aubert Gagné and Alain Rancourt did testing, help in R&D and experiments on certain products.
Nicolas Lachance for 25 years at various clerical and administrative tasks, now at the sales department.
Dany for 22 years at various technical tasks, now at the technical support department.
Denis Lafrenière for 32 years at various administrative tasks.
Where do our products' name come from?
At that time software names beginning by "Win" were popular when Windows 3.1 came out and names beginning by "Mac" were popular on Apple's Macintosh products. Since Regent had Mac based products at that time, it was convenient to use those trends and share a common product name accross platforms (e.g. WinDENDRO & MacDENDRO, WinRHIZO & MacRHIZO). For the last part of the name, we tried to choose a name that could be understood in multiple languages, often by using latin words. We wanted the name to indicate what the product was made for (e.g. DENDRO for dendrochonology and dendrometry).
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) serving customers
in over 98 countries since 1991
