Wrapping up 2015 and our plans moving into 2016

2015 was a year of growth at SpireTech!  I’d like to thank our employees and clients for
making it all possible.

As always, the tech industry is never boring and in constant change.  As usual, we are always looking for best-in-class solutions for our clients, and staying on top of trends in the industry to make sure we keep our competitive edge, without being bleeding edge.  Here are some highlights of our accomplishments in 2015:

  • Our “VIP support” and Managed services business grew 27% last year, mostly by word of mouth and your referrals! We do very little advertising, so your referrals are much appreciated – keep them coming!
  • We added the ability to manage and bill for your business’s Office365 services, along with your SpireTech services, on a single invoice. The response has been great, and we see this as a growth area for SpireTech and our clients.
  • We grew our PortlandCloud hybrid cloud services 69% last year. We added new servers, and released new versions of the cloud portal software and appliances with a great new UI!
  • We added high-availability Virtual server hosting based on Server 2012R2 Hyper-V Clustering.
  • We beefed up our Server data storage capacity by approximately 30TB.
  • More than doubled our datacenter’s internet speeds.
  • We reduced prices for web hosting and server colocation.
  • …All while maintaining a positive bottom line and compensating our employees well.

It’s not all good news, though as we’ve recently decided to (mostly) exit the residential DSL internet business in Centurylink territory as it is no longer profitable for us.  If you are curious about or affected by this, you can read this post for the details.

Looking into 2016

It’s safe to say certain trends are here to stay, including software licensing moving to a subscription model.  Moving into 2016, we think you’ll see an increased focus on Office365, not only from Spire, but the community at large.  It should be noted that our current view of Office365 isn’t one of “Cloud” but instead represents a shift towards subscription-based software licensing, along the lines of what Adobe, Autodesk, and others have been doing.  If you have a lot of seats of office to upgrade, Office365 sure eases the pain of writing that big check.

We are also working to become more agnostic about where servers we manage are located, embracing Azure and Amazon services in addition to our own Portland-based colocation facility.  We are looking to add capabilities relating to billing and managing these services wherever they may lie.

We look forward to the challenges you’ll bring us this year, and providing the best IT services available in the Portland metro area!  Thank you for your continued support!