Surface Engineering plays a vital role across a wide range of industrial processes and products, and has the potential to provide improved performance, better reliability, cost savings and added value. However, information and advice on how to exploit the technology is fragmented and uncoordinated, with expertise residing in a disparate body of suppliers, users, trade organisations and research institutions. Hence, the need to bring it all together under a single access point is long overdue and promises to provide industry with a large commercial return.

The SurfaceWeb site was built by a consortium of industrial companies with funding from the European Comunity's Esprit programme. The project was named 'SAMSON' and the partner companies were CA Technology (UK), A T Poeton (UK), Euromat (Germany), Flametal (Italy), Comint (Spain) and ESIL (Ireland). The Information Technology and Web-Link aspects were managed by the IT Innovation Centre at Southampton (UK).

The site is now being hosted by CA Technology Ltd.