Agility turns 15! We can’t believe it’s been so long. It’s truly been 15 incredible years of growth, challenges and successes. And of enormous change and transformation.
As we prepare to celebrate our 15th year anniversary this Wednesday (July 19th, 2017), we thought we’d look back at our 15 years of hard work and achievements. We’re incredibly proud of where we’re at today and couldn’t have done it without our loyal customers, our partners and our hardworking team.
2002 – 2005: The Foundations
Agility (previously known as Edentity) was founded in 2002 by Jon Voigt and Michael Assad. Initially their focus was on custom development solutions and system integration services. They also decided very early on to become a Microsoft Partner and build solutions on the .Net platform.
The idea of building a CMS came up as Jon and Michael increasingly realized how challenging it was to make simple website content updates. In response, in 2003 they built a CMS called WebAdmin, later rechristened to WebConnect in 2004 and rebuilt as a cloud-based, multitenant SaaS solution, before the cloud was even a cloud.
As a SaaS solution, WebConnect was very innovative at the time and really helped cement some of the solid foundations and values of Agility, such as our commitment to provide not just a platform, but a flexible web solution and strong support to our customers.
2006 – 2013: The Agility Rebrand
In 2006, Edentity rebranded as Agility and a new golden age began. As the years went by, our focus started to shift from small and medium businesses to bigger customers, particularly in the Media and Entertainment Industry. Some of these customers are still with us today.
During this time, we became committed to providing web solutions that could grow with our clients, allowing them to trust our platform to expand with time and provide them with new features as their own needs developed. This has become a key approach for us and everyday we continue to listen to our customers and to ensure we can continue to meet their needs.
Around this time, we also began to focus on how to optimize and streamline the Agility platform and development tools to ensure that developers were able to easily and intuitively build on it. This, too, has become a central tenet of the Agility philosophy, and our heavy focus on content architecture and efficient user experience for content editors has been a great success.
In 2009 we made a bet on Microsoft Azure and jumped onto the Azure beta program, launching in 2010. Since then, we've become a Microsoft Enterprise Azure Partner and one of the leading cloud CMS platforms in Azure!
In 2012 more transformation arrived with our launch of the Agility Magazine Suite, an innovative web solution that allowed publishing companies to easily and quickly publish rich content online, saving months of setup and tens of thousands of dollars compared to traditional web publishing systems. This brought the Agility experience to a very large volume of customers, particularly in the independent publishing sector.
2013 – 2016: A Major Transformation
The last four years at Agility have been immensely exciting, bringing new transformation, challenges and growth. In October 2013, Jonathan Voigt assumed the role of CEO and the company embarked on a new journey to expand our services and support, to continue meeting the needs of our customers and to develop a suite of new products.
Our target audience too shifted and transformed, aligning to the needs of our customers and to the unique benefits of our product. We are now heavily focusing on the experience destinations sector, helping organizations such as museums, theaters and amusement parks to realize their vision of providing their customers with an amazing experience, both offline and online.
2014 brought a brand new website and a reframing of our product as a single central hub platform. Agility CMS became the main product offering to all our customers, with extras provided as optional add-on packages. With this in mind, the Magazine Suite was restructured into two separate packages.
Since then, we have added Ecommerce, Ticketing and POS to our product offering and continued to champion Agility as a central hub platform that allows our customers to efficiently integrate and manage all their online properties, not just their website. This increased focus on providing our customers with a central hub has brought them new exciting opportunities and use cases and we are working with them everyday to ensure this continues to be the case.
2017: 15th year...
This year Agility hit many growth milestones and continued to expand the team; from just seven employees in 2013, we've now hit 30 employees and growing! As our journey continues, we are even more on trend to continue providing the best customer experience thanks to new Customer Success, Content Creation and Sales roles within the team. It really is the most exciting time for the company since our inception and we feel more ready than ever to meet every customer's needs better!
From a single-desk office and two employees in 2002 to our new and spacious offices with over 30 employees in 2017, the Agility journey has been long and full of changes, but we wouldn’t have it any other way.
From the bottom of our hearts, we want to thank you for being part of our journey. Here’s a toast to the many years ahead and to continued transformation and growth!
The Agility Team