The past few months we’ve been searching high and low for a few great Contegians to add to our crew. We are growing, and in short, if you know of an exceptional individual and huge geek at heart (or someone who is open to becoming a lover of all things geek), we’d be interested in talking to them. Please check out website for current openings and submit credentials to: resumes@contegix.com.

We have been fortunate to find two such exceptional people and recent additions —Tim Boehmer (pictured at left), our Backup and Recovery Specialist, and Zack Georgeoff (picture at right), our Technical Engineer. Both gentlemen have extensive backgrounds in IT and come from very impressive backgrounds.

So next time you get logged in and see that all your data is safe and sound, be thinking of Tim —it’s his job to make sure your critical data is backed up around the clock for complete redundancy. And when you pick up that phone for support or shoot that email, you very well might get Zack, ready to help you get your support issue solved fast. They have both been great additions to our cast and crew of Contegians. If you are in need of additional backup (and want to keep Tim on his toes!) send your request to sales@contegix.com.

For those of us that work regularly in Atlassian’s full portfolio of products, we know that we are, in fact, a unique bunch unto ourselves who use software and supporting tools that not just any Joe or Jill Schmoe uses. Atlassian’s products are all built on open-source, and coming across others who use their products is becoming common, thanks to the products being such solid software. Plug: If you don’t use Atlassian’s stuff, try it! Some licenses for the software start at just $10~with proceeds going to charity!

In an effort to unite locals with the same passion for good software and to share tips and tricks about how to best utilize these tools, Contegix has partnered with Atlassian to set up a St. Louis Atlassian User Group. You can find our group on Meetup.com here: http://www.meetup.com/St-Louis-Atlassian/. Our first meeting is scheduled for Thursday, August 19 at 6 p.m. at Hatch, which is located in Maplewood at 7305 Marietta, St. Louis MO 63143. We welcome you to join the group, and of course, forward the information to those you know who use any of Atlassian’s products. Together we hope to share insight and information and perhaps learn a trick or two ourselves in addition to general good times and fun that comes with meeting people.

July 30th is SysAdmin Day and we at Contegix have decided to not just celebrate for a day but instead celebrate for the entire week!

We’ll be celebrating each day with food, fun, and giveaways.

We feel this is the perfect time to celebrate our engineering staff and give them kudos for all the work they do for Contegix and all of our customers each and every day.  As part of the week long celebration we will be giving away a PlayStation 3 to one lucky member of our staff.  We want our clients to help us decide who that lucky individual should be.  Please take a moment to nominate your favorite Contegix engineer and provide them some kudos for excellent assistance they have provided you.  You can nominate the engineer(s) of your choice here.  You can nominate as many different engineers as you wish and nominate the same engineer(s) more than once as long as a valid reason for nomination is provided.  Polls will be open until 9:00am CST on July 30th.

Thank you for helping us to celebrate SysAdmin Week!

At tradeshows we all know that the best part (in addition to networking and learning, of course) is the free swag. While we’ve never been big fans of pens and stress balls (one can only have so many), we are, in fact, huge fans of t-shirts.

With that said, the marketing team at Contegix put their collective noggins together. What resulted was a t-shirt paying tribute to Andy Warhol and Apple (who also did a similar thing), two things we appreciate beyond measure. The resulting shirt design is our nod to them.

We handed the shirts out at the recent Atlassian Summit (they were quite popular) and we’ve given each member of our staff a shirt as well, and some clients who have been stopping in at our offices. Note: If you want a t-shirt, stop in. Or, send a request directly to marketing@contegix.com. Please include your name, your title, and why you want a t-shirt. If you’ll be using it to cut the grass in, or to dry your car with, not so much. But, if you agree to send us a good (or funny) reason and a pic of you sporting the garment after you get it, we’ll be happy to send you one. We want as many zany photos of our clients and friends sporting the shirt that we can get, but please we only ask that the photos be kept in good taste (no nude shots!). They will be used for a  future top-secret project…

Thanks in advance!

In case you haven’t heard the news (but we’re pretty sure it spread like the oil slick in the gulf), Contegix announced our forthcoming expansion into Europe with a state-of-the-art data center. All of the support and infrastructure management will still be handled from the St. Louis, MO USA offices.

There has been some buzz around the subject of possible satellite offices in Boston and San Francisco. This is not confirmed yet, but as soon as we know more, we’ll be announcing it here. What we can tell you is this: our St. Louis offices will be growing substantially not just in terms of square footage, but in terms of staff,  as well.

Our announcement was given at the Atlassian Summit in San Francisco, which we helped to sponsor this year, by our Co-Founder and CTO, Craig McElroy, during the Launch Pad Competition.

We had the opportunity to meet lots of developers and other Atlassian-pasionate people from across the globe, and catch up with our friends at Atlassian, as well. In short, the Summit was a great success and we’ll be looking forward to next year’s Summit. Who knows what big changes we’ll have by then. Take a look at our blog for our Summit Recap! Lots more information there and plenty of pictures!

We are not ones for shameless plugs or really even asking for any time from our valuable customers (since it’s our job to make sure you HAVE time free of IT worry), but we are asking for your support for a change if you’d be willing to give it.

Contegix is up again this year in the Linux Journal Reader’s Choice Awards for Favorite Linux-Friendly Web Hosting Company. We won last year against more formidable-sized firms, which was a major accomplishment; it let us know that you, our customers and friends, believe in the hard work that we do day in and day out, 365 days a year to keep our customers online and to protect their livelihoods.

We would greatly appreciate your support by going to:
http://contegix.com/lj2010

You don’t have to subscribe to the magazine in order to vote, and it will only take a few seconds of your time. One vote per person, please.

Feel free to share this information with your colleagues and friends. Like David, we are going up against multiple Goliaths again this year, and we want to show the world that excellent customer service still counts for something in technology.

Thank you for your continued support!

Whew! What a Summit!

This past June 9-11th a group of Contegians went to sunny San Francisco, CA to attend the 2010 Atlassian Summit. Contegix was a sponsor of the event this year, and had a booth presence in the partner pavilion, where we spent time talking to clients, answering questions and speaking to several new faces about our services. We had quite a few familiar faces stop by and say hello, and even more step over to introduce themselves – some from as far away as Sweden, Brazil and Italy. It was encouraging to know that they had heard about Contegix, even in the further stretches of the globe.

During the Summit, we were able to catch up with our many of our partners, listen to some exciting presentations, and participate in the Launch Pad Competition – an event where sponsors competed for the best presentation of a product that they were “launching”. Hats off to our client, Gliffy, who won with their great presentation that they delivered dressed as pirates!

For our presentation, delivered by our CTO and Co-founder Craig McElroy, we decided to make a special announcement of our expansion into the European market.  The forthcoming presence will be a state-of-the-art data center offering our hosting, colocation and cloud services in the European data center with all support remaining  stateside from our global headquarters in St. Louis, MO. Overall, the feedback on our presentation and news was great from the audience. We got more than a few laughs and many people offered congrats. We are really excited to be offering services in Europe. It is a huge step for our company, and a sign of the bigger things to come.

The Summit was not only very informative when learning  about all the latest Atlassian products and new features, but also fun! The good folks over at Appfire, another partner of Atalssian, hosted one heck of  party, (The Firewater Party) in the Presidential Suite of the InterContinental Hotel, where the Summit was being held. We got to catch up with Mat Gauvin, Appfire’s COO, and hear a bit about some hot new technologies that they have in place to support the Atlassian products.

The next day at the Summit, a few of us manned the booth, while others took the opportunity to learn about the latest updates to some Atlassian products -namely, JIRA. There are many great advancements to the Studio product this year, that we are sure developers will love. The 2nd day at the Summit was great, but the Atlassian Summit Party was even better. Tom Cruise (or a very believable likeness) stopped by to say hello to all the attendees, and pose for a few pictures. We wrapped the night toasting to new found friends and of course, planning the strategy for next year’s Summit, which we are really looking forward to.

Here are more photos from the Summit. Feel free to browse here and our Facebook Fan Page to see what your favorite group of geeks were up to during the Summit…

USA Tech Company Contegix Expanding Services to the European Market.

SAINT LOUIS, Missouri (June, 2010) – Contegix, a privately held technology firm specializing in Internet infrastructure services, announced plans today to begin the process of expanding globally to Europe, at the 2010 Atlassian Summit being held in San Francisco.

Everyone at Contegix is excited and thrilled to be expanding on our capabilities by having a data center in Europe. It also signifies a period of tremendous growth and expansion for our company. We’ll be adding to our staff and will be expanding the size of our corporate and support divisions to handle the growth. We’ve already had several notable clients express an interest in having data managed in our state-of-the-art center in Europe,” said Matthew Porter, CEO and Co-Founder of Contegix.

Contegix provides Internet infrastructure services for a variety of companies – from innovative tech start-ups, to widely recognized brands such as Live Nation, and Six Apart, as well as some non-disclosed Fortune 500 companies. Clients are driven to Contegix seeking reliability in customer service and advanced engineering support to handle complex security challenges – all areas that set this unassuming, Midwestern firm apart. “We’ve built our business directly from referrals of happy clients. That’s a pretty big testament to the quality of our work,” said Porter.

The announcement comes in the wake of last year’s groundbreaking news – that Contegix would offer cloud services to its customers. The Contegix cloud is now virtually unmatched by any other cloud service, public or private, in the industry when it comes to reliability and performance.

“We decided that now is the time to expand and make ours a global company, allowing us to offer more data security diversity to existing and new clients. We’ve also considered opening additional satellite offices in San Francisco and possibly Boston – but those options are still being considered at this point in time. First things first – Europe” stated Porter.

News of the forthcoming expansion was announced by the CTO and Co-founder, Craig McElroy, at the Atlassian Summit’s Launch Pad event. “A lot of careful planning and work went into these efforts. It’s a long time coming. We are ready to grow and be positioned to offer our services to more clients across the globe. We are appreciative that Atlassian permitted us to make the announcement at the Summit, which we helped to sponsor this year,” said McElroy.

Contegix holds expertise in high security managed hosting, cloud computing, applications management, colocation and Internet infrastructure intelligence. Their award-winning service is delivered by a staff of Tier-3 engineers from their headquarters in St. Louis, MO. To find out more, please visit www.contegix.com.

Contegix Announces Sponsorship of Jasig

St. Louis, MO (June 3, 2010) – Contegix, a leading provider of Internet infrastructure intelligence and hosting management services, announced its sponsorship of the Jasig not-for-profit organization, which provides a collaborative environment to foster the development of open source technologies and software for higher education.

Contegix will be providing hosting and managed support of the Jasig Internet infrastructure. This will allow the organization to focus on its core business – the development of their software products and supporting the growing community. The new Jasig infrastructure is built on Contegix’s stable platform and is fully managed by 24×7 Contegix engineers.  Thus, it will greatly reduce the time spent doing troubleshooting and support internally.

“A few years ago, many people still questioned the use of open source software in higher education,” says Matthew Porter, CEO and Co-Founder of Contegix. “Organizations such as Jasig are showing that through collaboration amongst institutions and commercial parties, open source software and related projects can enable future advancements in the higher education environment. Jasig’s projects enable many global educational institutions to benefit from the contributions of a highly technical community and we are proud to support this endeavor.”

As a company, Contegix believes strongly in the open source community, the Linux community, and the power of the entrepreneur in the social web since it was founded. For this reason, mixed with the desire as an organization to give back to the community, they sponsor individuals, organizations, and their respective projects for the betterment of all.

“We’re very pleased that Contegix has joined us as our newest Partner,” said Jonathan Markow, Executive Director of Jasig.  “We have already migrated our infrastructure applications to their facilities, and they have more than lived up to their excellent reputation for technical know-how, project management skills, and customer service.  We couldn’t be more satisfied with their support.  We welcome Contegix to the Jasig community and look forward to working together with them.”

Contegix is a technology firm known for delivering exceptional customer service and Internet infrastructure intelligence. Their dedicated staff of engineers provide solid solutions to complex business challenges in the areas of hosting, cloud computing, co-location and infrastructure management services. Founded in 2004, Contegix was listed as the Linux Journal’s Reader’s Choice Award for Favorite Linux-Friendly Web-Hosting Company, and has built a solid industry reputation entirely based on delivering peace of mind to valued clients. They serve clients in range of industries – from innovative technology start-ups to Fortune 500 companies.

About Jasig

Jasig is a global consortium of educational institutions and commercial affiliates sponsoring  free and open source software projects for higher education.  The group aims to attract, advance, and sustain communities developing enterprise-level, open source software that helps institutions fulfill their goals. Jasig connects people, provides infrastructure, and sponsors events that foster innovation and collaboration.  Flagship projects include uPortal, an enterprise portal; CAS, the Central Authentication Service used for single sign-on and secure, proxied authentication; and Bedework, an enterprise calendar used for public events and personal and group calendaring. Jasig also manages a Project Incubator designed to mentor new open source projects in building community, increasing collaboration, and achieving sustainability.  For more information, visit the Jasig website at www.jasig.org.

A Developer-Run Conference by the Geeks, for the Geeks.

Imagine a conference for developers where  a mix of languages and technologies are spoken, promotes innovation and pushes the envelope on technology, while maintaining the creativity and camaraderie that makes being a geek nowadays such a  coveted title. Well friends, there is such a  conference and it’s called Strange Loop.

Why, it even has a speaking session (Strange Passions) where attendees can compete for a  coveted Klein Bottle simply by talking about that random thing that they are passionate about – let’s say, string cheese for example.  Of course, there are educational tracks that cover subject matter from Java to jQuery, from Griffon to Groovy and has sessions for web developers and the mobile mavens alike. The speakers lineup is currently forming and from the looks of things, it promises to have some heavy hitters this year. Sounds pretty sweet right?  Well, as if that isn’t enough, word is, they have one heck of a party, too.

When our friend Alex (who happens to organize this shindig since its founding last year) called us up, of course we wanted to do whatever we could on our end to help make this event a smashing success. And so, we became a key sponsor and plan to have some of our great folks at the event to answer questions and maybe throw our hat in the ring for the Strange Passions talks.

Why you should attend:

For one, Strange Loop is packed full of information and is very reasonably priced for all of the knowledge that you are taking away.  Secondly, you’ll be able to meet and talk to a variety of technology professionals – from engineers to the top brass in a relaxed environment that is conducive to sharing knowledge and insight. It’s being held in St. Louis – a great city smack dab in the middle of the US and home to Contegix, your favorite technology and hosting  partner. Not only that, the Delmar “Loop” area is home to some fantastic eateries, public houses (pubs/bars for the rest of us), eclectic shopping (note: they have a great comic book store and record shop) and it’s one of the best people watching spots in the city.

We will keep you all posted as more information becomes available. Be sure not to miss this event. It may be titled strange, but it is going to turn out to be one of the most normal things you’ll make a part of your educational and networking opportunities now and in the future.