A story by one of our founders, Paul O’Brien, on how Lucidity came to be.
I hadn’t given this too much thought until the other day… but crikey… it’s just dawning on me – we’ve been doing this 20 years!
On the 1st August 2002, we signed a 60 month $100k contract to deliver a remote desktop solution for a travel agent – $1666.66 a month recurring revenue for the next 5 year.
MHA was born. It didn’t even cover the DC costs at the time. But it was the start.
In the months leading up to signing the contract, I was busy trying to negotiate, and Jarred was busy prototyping our V1 platform on a whole bunch of clone PC’s we’d bought.
With the customer signing off on the solution, I sold my nice car (and bought my Mum’s old Ford Laser), pulled together every penny I could, and financed IBM Servers and a NAS box.
Behold – MHA v1.0
We successfully delivered the Serko Corporate desktop application along with MS Office 2000 on Windows 2000 Server and Citrix v1.0. Active Directory was also brand new V1.0.
We were bleeding edge.
And we got cut.
After going live with the solution, I’d messed up my math on the amount of internet bandwidth the solution would use, and got my decimal point in the wrong place. What I thought was going to be something like 300mb a day traffic was like 3gb – the ADSL connection the customer was on was going to cost thousands a month in Telecom overages. We’d burnt through their data plan on day 1 🙁
To stop the cash burn, we picked the whole platform up out of the DC the first night and moved it all to the photocopier room of the travel agency we were hosting, it ran from their floor for the next few weeks!
Also, the desktop ran like rubbish with 40 users on it… It didn’t do that in our testing!! ☹
Jarred and I had no idea what to do, we sat on the balcony of the travel customer that evening for hours after ripping it out of the DC at 5pm and setting it all up in their office – freaking out – but we came up with a plan.
Jarred found Walker Wireless – a new ISP in town that used a wireless modem, and more importantly – Unlimited Domestic Bandwidth!! (Which was not a cheap thing in 2002).
We frantically installed the circuit with an antenna on the roof of the business in Broadway, Newmarket over the coming weeks. We also learnt a valuable lesson that day – do not install the drivers the vendor supplied on CD-ROM with the servers. The Broadcom (again pretty new) network card drivers on the disk were bad and everything ran terribly.
We reinstalled the new drivers, and the platform went back to how we anticipated $40k’s worth of tin was going to perform. Thank goodness.
We sorted the travel business. They had a remote desktop solution that no one else in NZ in the industry had that could accomodate their multiple office and remote brokers working from home – the word spread there is now a solution for travel agencies to be able to have staff work from anywhere, full or part time, multi office – all accessing the one system.
Soon we had 4-5 corporate travel agents on the platform. But we weren’t making enough to make ends meet.
Jarred and I both had stints at daytime contracts while trying to keep the platform running in the background by night – there was a lot of juggling and customer support calls on lunch breaks of our day jobs.
But we did grow. I was contracting to an Insurance company, and they were putting in a new Citrix Farm at the time. Pentium 4 processors!! We brought 20 of their old Dual Pentium III servers off them second hand and built a bigger Citrix farm. The racks were growing… more servers to worry about at night would keep running 😊 This was before virtualisation had existed.
In 2015, we had a rebrand – the complicated longest name in history – Managed Hosted Applications Limited had to get modern, and Lucidity was born (although we’d moved past the orange dot logo by then…)
became…
Fast forward 20 years, and here we are today. End of an era in terms of physical hardware to worry about, but a whole new world of options with modern public cloud and beyond…
In 2023, Lucidity are 100% in the cloud. There are no more servers in data centres for our team to worry about. We leverage the award winning Microsoft Azure platform.
If you think our experienced team can help you get rid of your old on-premise IT equipment, please get in touch with myself or the team.
