One of our clients recently canceled their contract with us. While we’re sad to see them go, we recognize that their business has changed in the time we’ve been working with them—more than a decade, actually.

This particular company was focused on IT services for public school systems and providing a way to keep everything running smoothly without the school system requiring an on-site IT staff. Schools have a lot of data. In the old days, all of the technology to store and process that data was on-premise in the building and had to be maintained by either a team of staff members or an outsourced company.

This client of ours launched a new service in the early 2000s that took all of that data and moved it off-site. Basically, it was a cloud-based software as a service (SaaS) long before we had labels for either of those things. They were frontrunners in that regard. And it was a multi-tenant database before that was normal, too. Each school only saw their own data, but it was all in the same system.

Our company was involved pretty early on in helping them design the database, then there was a short period where another company supported their database before we returned to providing that service. In the almost 20-year history of the company, there were only three database administrators that worked on that project.

That makes a big difference in consistency of a product. It also made it pretty seamless at the end of each school year when things needed to be closed out.

Today, there are a lot of competing systems out there, so this client decided to stop investing in that particular product and move on to other areas of innovation for them. As fast as technology is growing, even the greatest new idea doesn’t stay new for very long. Software as a service is an incredibly competitive field, and that’s a good thing really.

So while we’re always sad to lose a client, we’re also celebrating their long-running success in their industry and their recognition that it’s time to move on to other things.

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