Almost two decades of history.
Our history as a company is long and varied, and as with any story like this, not without its bumps in the road. Even so, the perseverance of our team and the loyalty of our partners and clients have allowed us to grow and prosper. A lot has happened in the last 20 or so years, and while we celebrate our victories, we also appreciate that our less-than-shining moments have taught us things that make us the company we are today.
Since we've started, we have built a network of partners that work with us to offer solutions from dozens of carriers to thousands of clients. And we're proud to say that not only do we still have our original partners agents working with us, we've had a lot of fun along the way.
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CDSI is founded
It all dates back to 1994, when Josh Anderson left the University of Florida to start CDSI, an IT company that specialized in software-based PBX systems and custom IVR applications. These systems were the grandparents of today’s sophisticated IP-PBXs.
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Deregulation ushers in a new era
With telecom deregulation in 1996, the CLEC market exploded, and by the late 90’s the newly competitive market allowed us to bundle voice and data services with hardware, providing a total solution. CDSI was soon making as much money doing carrier service consulting as selling CPE. Things were off to a promising start.
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Setbacks prompt a change of direction
As with many new, lucrative markets, communications attracted its share of shysters. CDSI had two separate master agents default on over $100,000 in monthly customer billings. It didn’t take long for us to decide to take matters into our own hands. We decided to start a company that did things the right way. We wanted to build the company we would want to do business with.
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Acquisition negotiations begin
At the time, key carrier agreements were not easy to quickly get, so we began negotiations with a South Florida communications company that had acquired some agreements but wasn’t able to meet commitments. This was to be key to our ability to fast-track the organization.
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Telephony Partners is founded
After a year of talks, the deal was finalized and Telephony Partners was formally established. With a core network of partners, we went to work building the business. The first few years were spectacular. As sad as it is to say, doing business ethically was at the time a huge differentiator.
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Qwest makes us a Premier Business Partner
Qwest (now CenturyLink) was one of our key carrier relationships. By this time, our focus had begun to evolve away from telephony and more toward hosting / collocation and enterprise data networks, and Qwest was one of the only tier-one carriers with a solid offering in those areas. Our promotion to a Premier Partner gave us higher margins and deeper access to Qwest resources.
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We win 2nd place at Redbull Flugtag
Team Air Gilligan, comprised of Telephony Partners employees and spouses, wins 2nd place at Redbull Flugtag in Tampa, FL, flying a biplane made of aluminum tubing, styrofoam, and pallet wrap an admittedly short distance into the water. This remains one of our proudest achievements.
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Development begins on our partner portal
After having used several off-the-shelf solutions to manage our partner channel and finding them all to be lacking, we decided to tackle the problem ourselves. We knew this was a big undertaking, but we were sure we could do it better.
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The partner portal is released
Eight months after we started, it was done. We finally had our partner portal, designed from the ground up to simplify the opportunity process and maximize commissions processing speed and accuracy.
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The Moya Group is established
We begin expanding our service set to include infrastructure management and professional services. Because the name “Telephony Partners” is pretty much meaningless to people buying those services, we decide to establish a division to operate under its own brand.
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Telephony Partners makes the Inc500/5000 list
Telephony Partners appears on the Inc500/5000 list. Considering we were 10 years old, we're proud that we were able to sustain that kind of growth.
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We become Acuity Technologies
Telephony Partners and its infrastructure management division, The Moya Group, become Acuity Technologies, incorporating Moya's service set into Telephony Partners' strong partner channel. Side benefit — we no longer have to explain how to spell or pronounce "telephony."