We’ve all been told that “you can’t know where you’re going until you know where you’ve been.” 2012 was a wild year for us, and before we get too far into 2013, we wanted to reflect on everything we did in the last year.

January: Goodbye Joomla 1.7, Hello Cloudy

In January we updated our own site to Joomla 2.5 and started offering 2.5 demo trial sites to all of our clients. All of our knowledgebase content and webinars also started focusing on 2.5 material. Pawel Borowicz, our graphic artist, also came up with several variations of Cloudy, our mascot. 

February: More Team Members & Our Own IP Addresses

We were allocated our own set of IP Addresses from ARIN, the American Registry of Internet Numbers, and “the two Jens”, Jen Berigan and Jenny Marriott, joined our team in February.

March: New Server Racks & a Platform Programmer

We purchased a second server rack built with Texas Memory Systems SANS Storage for virtual private server environments. Julio Pontes, a Platform Programmer, also joined our team in March.

April: CloudAccess.net Poland

Although our Polish team was strong in numbers, they had a teeny tiny office. The new CloudAccess.net Poland office is located in Szczecin, in a promenade called Deptak Bogusława. The newly-remodeled and modern office is almost 2,000 square feet and it was the second CloudAccess.net office established, following only the Traverse City headquarters. This office houses nine team members and still has plenty of room for adding more. We selected this office purposefully with the objective of adding additional team members in the future. Employees from almost every team work from the Polish location - Joomla! Support Engineers, a Graphic Designer, Server Administrators, Front-End Developers and Platform Team Specialists.

May: We are Winners!

At the J! and Beyond event in Bad Nauheim, Germany, we were awarded the 2012 J!OSCAR Award for Best Joomla! Services. Our own Saurabh Shah was at the event to accept the award for the company.

June: Product & Platform Development, CloudAccess.net India, and More New Faces

Having already purchased the new server rack in March, our Platform was expanded we launched two new products - the Joomla! VPMC and the Compliant Cloud Backup. We also officially announced our Bolt DNS worldwide network and our Managed SSL Certificates. June also saw the addition of our CloudAccess.net India located in Ahmedabad, Gujarat on the 7th Floor of the Pratiksha Complex. CloudAccess.net India is in a popular commercial area located in south west Ahmedabad, India. The office is near many other corporate offices for national and international companies. With two current team members at this location, and three remote Indian team members, this office has the potential of adding up to four additional employees. Summer Hency, our Billing Account Manager, also joined CloudAccess.net Traverse City and Michelle Borowicz, a Cloud Support Engineer, joined our Cheboygan team.

July: Still Winning

During July we won Joomla Hosting Review’s award for Best Joomla as a Service Company. In July we also finalized the purchase of CloudAccess.net Cheboygan located at 504 Division Street in a 50,000 square foot facility that was formerly Cheboygan Middle School. Members of our Support and Business Development Teams operate an office within the building and we lease much of the space to North Central Michigan College (NCMC). We worked closely with NCMC to refurbish 8 state-of-the-art classrooms, and NCMC is currently using much of the facility for The Straits Area Education Center, bringing valuable secondary educational opportunities to Cheboygan. There is a computer lab and each classroom comes equipped with an interactive iPad and LCD monitor that can be incorporated into instruction. Read more about CloudAccess.net Cheboygan!

August: Joomla.org, Data Centers & Speaking Engagements

In August we renewed the contract with Joomla.org to be the official and exclusive host of the demo.joomla.org, and we got our own data center in Detroit, Michigan. This was a big deal because we finally stopped leasing server space and got our own facility. We even gave new meaning to Cloud Computing. Jonathan Gafill, our Project Manager, also spoke at the Joomla! Day Chicago event about the award-winning SPARC social intranet that we created for the Boston Children’s Hospital. Larisa Patel, a Cloud Support Specialist, also joined our CloudAccess.net India team.

September: PageRank & More Speaking Engagements to Joomla!

September was a big month because we reached the Google PageRank of 8, a major accomplishment proving the popularity of our service. Dominik Kucharski, a CloudAccess.net founder and Front End Developer spoke about Front End Optimization to a full house at Joomla! Day Poland. Julio Pontes spoke about JPlatform at Joomla! Day Brazil and Saurabh Shah also spoke about creating and modifying Joomla! templates at Joomla! Day Spain. Joomla also released its 3.0 version in September and we started modifying our entire platform to accommodate 3.0 sites.

October: Joomla! 3.0

We launched the new demo.joomla.org site and started offering automated 3.0 demo sites through our platform in October.

November: Accelerate Michigan Innovation Competition & Joomla! World Conference

In November we were selected as a finalist in the Accelerate Michigan Innovation Competition, the largest business plan competition in North America. We were invited to present a company pitch in Detroit, Michigan for a chance at winning $500,000. Ryan Bernstein, "The Professor", and Charlie Hague, our Chief Financial Officer, put up a good showing for our company in Detroit. Several of our team members also traveled to San Jose, California to attend the Joomla! World Conference. Jonathan Gafill presented the case study SobrietyMonitor.com, a company incubated by CloudAccess.net that integrates a hardware with a custom Joomla! application. November was also a big month for our Platform Development Team because we brought our Cloud Control Panel into the CloudAccess.net Client Area.

December: Partners & Clients

In December we expanded our Partner Program to include separate Developer, Affiliate and Reseller Programs and we reached 7,500 active clients. We’re very proud of the all the relationships we’ve built with our partners and our clients. December also saw the release of the second edition of The Official Joomla! Book authored by our own Jennifer Marriott. Autographed copies are now available. We also contributed a ton of time and resources to the Joomla! project in 2012. We offered free domains and hosting for the J!Day event site, we hosted community wide webinars including a Multilingual Webinar and a JUX Webinar featured on the Joomla YouTube Channel. We contriuted a new Joomla!Day logo in addition to several other logos and images on Joomla.org and we even published an article in the Joomla Community Magazine.

Whew! (Exasperated sigh). As you can see, we were quite busy in 2012. There is probably a bunch of stuff that we are forgetting, but who can blame us with everything that we accomplished? There were also a few items intentionally left off this list as we develop those pieces to be announced early in 2013. We’re looking forward to a promising new year and we wish you the same!