For the last 13 years, we have supported more than 200,000 customers from over 50 countries across the world as a leading provider of cloud-hosted Microsoft software applications. Now we are bringing our expertise to help customers get the best out of Office 365, a Microsoft Cloud-based platform that is increasing its dominance as the business productivity software of choice in organizations of all sizes.
A Brief History
We started out in 2003 as a Managed Services Provider (MSP), remotely managing IT infrastructure and applications for web hosting companies and corporate offices. In those days, web hosting and corporate IT departments lived in two different worlds and we learnt to live in both the worlds.
Supporting Web Hosts Prepared Us for the Cloud
The web hosting business was always very competitive. Young startups were capital- starved forcing them to experiment with primarily open source software based on Linux/Apache/mySQL and on Windows platform. These early web entrepreneurs outsourced management and 24/7 support, and a lot of the heavy lifting to us. Working with these most demanding clients prepared us for the Cloud. At one point we were providing support to the customers’ of 50 large hosting companies and managing their servers in over 100 data centers all across the globe.
Working for the web hosting industry was like working in an Intensive Care Unit for servers with added vulnerabilities to attacks from viruses and hackers. Downtimes would affect tens of thousands of customers in minutes.
We learnt the discipline required to maintain 99.99 percent uptime – monitoring software, cluster designs with failovers, protecting and recovering from Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) attacks, patching and hardening servers, following reliable backup procedures and tools, and carrying out thousands of migrations with no downtimes.
We performed the gamut of services. We experimented with open source software with weak documentation, scrambling to learn from online forums where the bugs were revealed and workarounds were found. We integrated software from multiple vendors with custom coding to offer an easy to use web-based interface to manage support, billing, and provisioning of servers and applications.
We Created Hosted Microsoft Applications for the Corporate Market
Armed with our knowledge and discipline acquired from supporting Web hosts, we targeted small businesses for higher end hosting services. We had been working with small to medium sized businesses, remotely managing on-premise Windows servers and desktops and providing them with corporate level support. These businesses could not afford to have dedicated IT department and were drawn to the Microsoft software based Cloud solutions we developed for them. Starting with just a few customers on Exchange 2003 and SharePoint 2003, we made our fully commercialized products with Hosted Exchange 2007 and Hosted SharePoint 2007.
In 2010, we did even better – we were the first to release Hosted SharePoint 2010 and Hosted Exchange 2010, and in spite of problems with multi-tenancy, we pioneered Hosted SharePoint 2010 Standard and Enterprise editions. We continued to add to our offerings with hosted Exchange 2013, SharePoint 2013, Project Server 2010 and 2013, Dynamics CRM hosting, virtual servers and hosted virtual desktops.
In the process, we acquired the trust of businesses from the largest Fortune 500 companies to the smallest of organizations, working with over 10,000 clients in the last decade.
We Become an Office 365 Cloud Service Provider
As a Microsoft Partner, we had been closely following the progress of Microsoft Online Services. We tested the predecessor to Office 365, the Microsoft Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS), in 2010. BPOS was based on Exchange 2007 and SharePoint 2007, and our hosted product lines were already ahead.
Then in 2011, Microsoft brought out Office 365 based on 2010 products and later an updated product in 2013. Finally, Office 365 started gaining wide acceptance not just among small businesses but the largest of companies with hundreds of thousands of seats.
Recognizing that Office 365 is the future, we applied and were accepted as a Tier-1 Microsoft Cloud Service Provider, a privilege only a few companies enjoy. We are fully committed to the program and our unique experience makes us one the best positioned provider of services for Office 365.
