Challenges. We don’t just like them, we live for them. The thinking, the strategy, the planning, the implementation – the whole process.  Our engineers tackle them head on and generally get a thrill from finding the answer to a tough problem.

Three months ago our partner, Atlassian, came to us with one such challenge and true to Contegix form, we met it head on and worked around the clock make it happen.

The challenge:

Help Atlassian bring their application JIRA Studio to the public via Google Marketplace (Google Marketplace offers products and services designed for Google users, including installable apps that integrate directly with Google Apps).

For quite some time, Contegix has been providing the infrastructure and hosting that powers the JIRA Studio application since the product was created. JIRA Studio (for those  who haven’t had the opportunity to use this product) is a hosted software development suite that supports every role of a development team through each stage of the development process without worrying about tool infrastructure.

We worked closely with Atlassian to prepare the product for bulk provisioning through Google, and to enable Atlassian to provision either Google Apps or regular studio instances through their normal provisioning interfaces. Custom and intelligent provisioning is something that is unique to Contegix, and would have been unavailable to Atlassian through other cloud providers.

Not to toot our own horn, but our solution for Atlassian is pretty robust. Through our custom provisioning interface, Atlassian is able to provide customer-specific data which is automatically used to build the JIRA Studio instance.  This allows Atlassian to set customer licenses, provide custom usernames and passwords, or to conditionally build the customer a Google Apps-Enabled or a Traditional JIRA Studio instance.  In addition, our team manages all of the  virtual machines, monitors them, and automatically updates them according to Atlassian’s specifications.

The entire launch of the product went beautifully,  has opened many doors for Atlassian, and for our team in providing software provisioning as a service for our partners and clients.

Taking an application in 3 months to market? Mark that challenge as met and solved. We are looking forward to the next one that will be thrown at us. We live for this stuff…

Have a great weekend everyone,

The Contegian

We are pleased to announce that on March 28th Contegix will be implementing a new tool within our support operations. For some time now we have been developing a new support ticketing system that will function as a core component of our day-to-day support activities. While it may not always be apparent to our customers, there is a great deal of activity that takes place behind the scenes that allows our technical engineers to continue to provide the high quality of support we promise our customers. We currently utilize an off the shelf product that has served us well for several years but, unfortunately, still left us with some operational inefficiencies. As a company dedicated to high quality customer care we wanted a ticketing system that would meet our unique demands with the utmost efficiency.   Therefore, we decided to build our own. We are now prepared to introduce the spoils of the time, effort, and dedication we have exercised in building our own application.  We call this new tool Noctane.

As a company we knew we needed a support ticketing application built around our version of technical support. We did not want to buy an application and adjust our support vision to that application. We enlisted our partners at Relevance to assist us in taking our vision of a support ticketing application from idea to final product. I would personally like to thank the team at Relevance for their continued efforts in helping Contegix develop Noctane from concept to actual reality. We would not be launching Noctane on March 28th without you.

Our first release of Noctane will allow Contegix technical engineers to be more efficient in our handling of your support requests and provide us better up-to-the-minute visibility of each active support request we have for our customers. We are confident these new tools and the efficiencies they will bring will only be a benefit to our customers and the overall Contegix support experience.

We will continue to expand on this first Noctane release both for our internal use and for our customer’s use. We are currently conducting development on a customer support portal that will be a key component of Noctane. This will provide our customers a new way to access Contegix Support and provide you more insight into your support issues with us. We are excited to introduce this new feature to our customers later this year.

The change on March 28th will have little to no impact on our customers. The migration process from our current support ticketing system to Noctane will not create any delay in the responsiveness to which customers are accustomed. We have taken all the necessary precautions and completed due diligence to ensure there is no impact on our normal support operations on the 28th.

There will be a few minor changes starting the 28th:

• Contegix ticket numbers will now have six digits instead of five (CNT-20100311.123456)
• Any open support issues on March 28th that are active at the start of the migration will be manually migrated and will receive a new ticket number; however, the old, five digit, ticket number will still be present
• Any support issues that were previously resolved prior to March 28th that are reopened will also receive a new ticket number

We are excited to implement Noctane into our support operations and excited to continue to provide industry leading technical support to all of our customers.

Thank you,

Jason Smith
Director of Client Services

It would seem that in this day and age, customer service has gone by the wayside for the mere sake of cost control .  The impact to the customer that needs the service is rarely a concern.

Fortunately, some companies and people still believe that great customer service is still the best way to run a business. In short: Take care of people. Because they can make or break you.

Many times we are asked as an organization just what stands us apart from our competitors. The answer has always been the same. We prefer to run a complete health wellness clinic versus a triage center. By the time a customer calls to complain about a service issue, they are already upset and frustrated. Bottom line, they just want their stuff to work and run right – and they want to be taken care of.

As a company, we take great care to make sure that we are always monitoring our clients’ managed infrastructure – making sure that a hiccup doesn’t become a full out case of indigestion and in nearly all instances, that those hiccups don’t even happen in the first place. But should they occur (which in the IT industry, they always do), our team moves into action to respond in 5 minutes or less, and work tirelessly until the client is happy. We take care of customers by taking care of their infrastructures and their concerns/problems/needs. We don’t give false promises that we deliver the “best service” – we just do because as consumers ourselves, we understand the frustrations of poor and incomplete service. And frankly, who really likes this type of service anyways? You really do get what you pay for.

Continual monitoring and delivering exactly what our brand promises (and standing by it) has quickly established Contegix as one of the best service providers in our field. We employ some of the best and brightest engineers in the industry who treat our clients not just as clients, but as friends of the virtual infrastructure hosting and managed support industry. And after all, you wouldn’t let a friend down or leave them hanging when they need help.  Would you?

Our attitude towards customer service is the reason we were fortunate enough to grow in 2009.  The reason is this: We run a wellness clinic rather than a triage clinic for our amazing customers.  A sincere thank you for all those that made it possible.

Here’s to the health of your organization.

Cheers,
Anne @ Contegix