In the early 90's, I started a BBS which lead to becoming an ISP offering dial-up. This turned into offering dedicated connections, hosting and collocation services. We were doing VoIP in the mid 90s which was interesting. We also got involved in digital video recording then live video broadcasting. Around 2000, I sold the user base to a larger ISP as telco's and cable companies started starving smaller ISP's out of business.

In 2000, I started building a development environment including a search engine project and other projects to learn more about clusters and grid computing and to see what I could come up with for new ideas.

This lead to becoming a small MSP, offering mostly VoIP but it also got us into the early days of offering virtual offices, remote working with centralized services over the Internet.

As an MSP, the most frustrating thing was getting calls from customers that their managed services were down when the majority of the time, it was their Internet. We used the best gear we could buy and could see that our services were up but it was stressful feeling that customers might still blame us not to mention the countless wasted visits.

I started putting together hardware and software installed at the customer locations so I could monitor problems from each locations perspective.  

After moving to Arizona, I decided to put all I had learned together into a service I could offer to others knowing how much time and money it saved us and how it created customer loyalty and accountability with all of the different providers.

Today, I am the founder of OutagesIO.com, a hybrid RMM, low cost, Enterprise remote monitoring service. The service allows IT to monitor dozens or thousands of Internet connected locations with alerts to problems in around 30 seconds. Our 2" device contains all of the software needed and even allows secure, remote access to networks without opening any firewall ports. It can also include environment monitoring.

As an added benefit, it provides analytics across all of the providers being used which can show a great deal of information over time.

EE has been a great resource and I love that there are no flame wars. I've asked everything from needing little scripts to building clusters and it's often been quite useful.

Having built and owned both an ISP and MSP company, I have hands on experience in every aspect of building and maintaining IT related environments and resources. I am not an expert at any one thing but have some experience in many technologies and when I need a little help, a community like EE is very useful in finding ideas, input, answers for my team.

I call myself a General Specialist, coined by my wife :).