This summer marks our 7^th year of business!

We started way back in 2002 when there wasn’t even a ‘we’ in sight, subletting a desk from an interior design firm at the Northwest Work Lofts. The design company would close just nine months later, which provided a gentle nudge towards establishing our first office across the street from the old Airborne Express headquarters and at the north edge of what would become the Seattle Art Museum’s Olympic Sculpture Park. Two and half years later that building was torn down, and we settled into our home of the last four years, here in Pioneer Square.

From the beginning, our mission has been to empower companies to succeed through the effective use of technology. Early on, we developed interactive applications (largely for Microsoft) and provided web design and development services. But we decided that providing IT consulting and support services was where we could make our most important contribution, so we made it our exclusive focus. And doing so successfully has required innovation and change along the way.

We recognized early on that the old way of providing IT support to our clients – the “break/fix” model as it’s often called – just wasn’t cutting it. So, we began imagining a more effective and strategic way of supporting our clients’ technology. The result has been the creation of a comprehensive and proactive managed services support strategy that includes people, processes, and technology. It has proven to be effective in reducing the disruption, downtime, and loss of productivity that were all too common under the “break/fix” model.

And today, we’re not only focused on helping our clients use technology strategically – we’re committed to being strategic ourselves. We’ve just put the finishing touches on X-BAR’s first vision, mission, and values statements, which will guide our actions as a growing company into the future. We look forward to introducing these to you in the coming weeks.

More than ever before, we’re excited to continue our work helping small and mid-sized companies to flourish through the effective use of information technologies. Thank you for being a part of the journey during our first seven years.

Posted by Brad Benner in Managed Services, X-BAR News on 27 July 2009. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.