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Earlier today TDS announced that it had acquired VISI. We are now a wholly-owned subsidiary of TDS Telecom, a Fortune-500 telecommunications provider (NYSE:TDS, TDS.S). It’s all good.
We had basically built the company up as far as we could on our own. Getting to the next level of growth required significantly more capital and far deeper pockets. We also recognized that there was a window of opportunity to really capitalize on our positioning in the regional market. We knew we had to find the right partner to help us grow. And TDS really has been a great partner during the transaction. We need them and they need us.
On a personal note, I am no longer the owner of a company for the first time in almost 9 years. It’s amazing to think back to a day when it was just a couple guys working out of a tiny room. We were able to build an organization that attracted the interest of some of the largest Internet and data center providers in the country. I can’t tell you exactly how that happened because the journey took ten-thousand tiny steps. I never for a single moment thought the business would fail. I thought it would grow much faster than it actually did. Isn’t that wishful thinking shared by most entrepreneurs?
I’m incredibly indebted to the people that helped me reach this point in my career and my life. Two key people are my wife, Susan, and my business partner Mike. And others include many of my co-workers. I appreciate your hard work and support over the years.
I’m relieved that all my years of hard work were ultimately rewarded. I can now focus on the future without the burden of supporting the growth of my business. I’m looking forward to the next chapter in my career.
We’ve finally launched ReliaCloud, our new cloud computing platform at VISI, after six months of hard work and the involvement of a dozen team members. Well done everyone!
Customers may now register for an account using a credit card and spin up ReliaCloud Servers running Windows and Linux OS stacks within 90 seconds. Services are billed using a standard hourly pricing model at rates starting around $0.05/hr.
We teamed up with Vmops to build our cloud platform and we leverage all of the features their cloud orchestration solution offers. Our platform developers really focused on security during this initial release. Each ReliaCloud customer has their own private network space within the cloud platform. The private cloud space is firewalled off from the public Internet. Customers can control what network traffic passes through the firewalls separating their public cloud space and the Internet. While this level of security isn’t necessarily state-of-the-art it is significantly better than what many other cloud providers offer today.
We plan to add new features and capabilities to the platform in the months ahead. Stay tuned!
