As we approach on our 10th year anniversary in business (January 1997-January 2007) and reflect all the things that have changed and all the projects this company has done, it's quite amazing. I recall the original employees of Managed Solutions Tim Ackroyd and Dennis Racine, who have since gone on to do very big things on their own. It makes me feel good to have been a part of that at some point. As many of you know the early 2000's in the dot-bomb era were tough for IT companies. We managed to weather the storm by working diligently with our customers to keep them moving forward and it has paid off. Some of our customers have grown larger than we could have dreamed, doing hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars of sales in their respective businesses. For a little walk down memory lane, I dug up some photos of a project we did for a distribution company back in 1999. My original employee Tim, his son and I built about 20 workstations in my garage in Fremont, CA. Ironically many of the brands of components we used back then are still on our preferred list today. They have also weathered the storm.

This project was interesting, and when I think about what we were able to do then, I am amazed. We had tied two sites together, one in Los Angeles, CA and one in Union City, CA for a distribution company. The sites had a 56K leased line and the clients in LA accessed a Macola accounting solution using NT4 workstations connecting to a terminal server in Union City. They had 5 workstations in LA and at times 3-4 would be using the leased line with the old terminal server client. The most amazing thing was how well everything worked. We had tested the solution on this end extensively and had determined that the 56K line would meet their needs.

Here are some pictures of the machine building process. Like many famous beginnings we were working out of my garage:

This was near the beginning of the build.

They are taking shape.

Looks like we've got them assembled.

Ready for delivery.

Now back at the customer site how about this clean looking side view of the Apex Rack:

Clean looking Apex Rack - Nortel Switches, Cisco Router, KVM, APC PDU

The early days of Managed Solutions were very rewarding and challenging for me. I hope that you've enjoyed this little retro experience though you probably couldn't possibly have enjoyed it as much as I did writing it! - Joe