Today we’ll be digging in a bit more deeply on the topic of Contegix’s role in simplifying our business and making hosting and infrastructure first class. As I mentioned in my previous post, the relationship between HotWax and Contegix (www.contegix.com) was forged while we researched migrating our clients’ custom Java applications from a dedicated host (your own server – but you manage the system administration) to a managed hosting provider (this is what Contegix provides for us).
As Apache OFBiz developers, the opportunity to offload some of the administration and monitoring of these applications seemed like a great option for a small company trying to service more and more customers – while maintaining an emphasis on quality of service. After all, at our core we are OFBiz Service Providers as opposed to infrastructure providers. So finding the best infrastructure experts and partnering with them gives us the best of both worlds — we focus on OFBiz applications, Contegix focuses on infrastructure, and our shared clients win!
The topics that differentiate Contegix from other providers are exactly what made this such an easy decision for us: passionate customer service, expert engineers, instantaneous response time, 24×7 support, 100% Network uptime SLA, attention to detail, etc. After the successful migration of our customers, we carefully looked at each of our applications to see where we could increase our ROI by utilizing more of Contegix’s resources instead of growing these system administration capabilities in house.
Over the past few years, HotWax Media has grown considerably and we have leaned heavily on our relationship with Contegix to help define how all of these disparate applications will work together. We have modeled our application choices based upon how they run their business – knowing that leveraging our partners proven workflows can only provide a greater synergy between our two companies and make us an even more efficient team. These days they manage everything from mail, chat and calendars (with the Zimbra groupware platform) to our global phone system, from single sign on (for all of our applications) to our business to business VPNs, from project management and collaboration software, to staging servers and a large number of production OFBiz installations. They scale with us and we look forward to finding new and creative ways to work together to provide the highest quality service possible.
The next post in this series will focus on the specifics of OFBiz deployment management with a continued emphasis on our partnership with Contegix.
– Tim
Tim Ruppert is Chief Operating Officer at HotWax Media as well as an OFBiz project committer and active community member. Tim will join other HotWax Media employees and advisors in periodically posting thoughts here related to OFBiz, eCommerce, ERP, and related topics.
