Hello everyone! I was speaking with a new customer recently, and they wanted to know how long Synapse Networks has been around, in business, kicking it, as it were… I thought for a minute and realized that we've been around for more than 25 years! I wanted to take a minute to reflect on that pretty incredible milestone for a small company. What have we been doing, what are we doing and what will we do in the future?

Synapse started in the mid 90's by Stuart Brainerd - he dropped out of a highly corporate background and thought he could capitalize on his background in telecommunications and computing by jumping into the market for delivering solutions based on ISDN – at the time a new service introduced by the US telephone carriers which delivered 128 Kbps service over standard phone lines. At that point in the 90s the only low-cost option for accessing CompuServe and AOL and for sending and receiving digital files was the use of analog modems.

The earliest Synapse Networks customers were companies in the printing, prepress, photo and ad delivery industries who needed reasonable cost solutions for transmitting large files.  Tukaiz, LLC, a successful privately run graphics and prepress company based in Franklin Park, IL, was the first customer to sign up for a Mac-based ISDN solution.

The Internet was just becoming a thing and companies like Ascend Communications and Netopia began offering ISDN-based TCP/IP routers which opened up fast Internet for small offices, without the high cost of T1 lines. With this shift, and the rapid development of the World Wide Web, the business began to morph into a networking company.

Fast forward to 2004, I had just graduated from Grad school and was looking for a place to call home, and I was actually a client of Stuarts and he said come work for us! I haven't looked back since. Over the years we've been involved in hundreds of networking and systems projects with a very broad and varied customer base. Let me take you through the years using the technology of the time:

• Blackberry server configuration and administration (what’s a Blackberry?)
• NetScreen firewalls (later acquired by Juniper Networks)
• 100Mbps, 1Gbps, 10G and beyond switching
• Windows Server 2003 right on up through Server 2022
• Exchange Server 2003, 2010, Microsoft BPOS, Microsoft 365
• VMware virtualization, shared storage, Microsoft Azure and Cloud Solutions
• MPLS, VPN, SD-WAN
• Wi-Fi networking starting with 802.11b through 802.11n, 802.11ac and Wi-Fi 6

Our philosophy and the reason we have been in business for so long is simple - give our customers technology options and advice based on informed intelligence and deep knowledge of the industry. We are constantly learning and evolving as required by current market forces. An excellent example of this is how well our customers evolved and transitioned to work from home during the pandemic - every one of our customers that we assisted with the design and security of their network were well positioned to simply shift to at home work with only minor interruption. As we learned by gaining new clientele, not all consulting companies were as nimble.

The landscape of technology is changing quite dramatically - moving systems and apps to the cloud, strengthening security down through the endpoint and secure high-speed networking - these are a few of the ongoing challenges in today's environment. Reducing a company's onsite footprint doesn't always reduce the complexity and that's why we are here to help. If you are worried about ransomware we can help. If you want to move your servers or specific applications to the cloud, we have some ideas on that. If you need some advice on your network or need some highly skilled engineering to troubleshoot a tough issue, we have the skills you need.

We lead with the help of our strategic partnerships with technologies we believe in. Our principal partners that we work closely with:

• Palo Alto Networks
• Cisco
• Fortinet
• Crowdstrike
• Microsoft
• Extreme Networks
• Ruckus Wireless
• KnowBe4

If we have done business with you in the past, thank you and don’t be shy to reach out to us with any current needs you might have! If you haven't heard of us, come check us out at https://www.synapse.tech or drop a line at sales@synapse.tech. Let us know how we can help!