Celebrating our first aTech Anniversary!

This week marks exactly one year since we welcomed aTech, a UK coding house that writes some of the world’s very best software, into the Krystal family. And we felt such an important union should be celebrated!

A perfect alignment

Something we’ve learnt here at Krystal is that to be able to grow successfully while remaining independent, you need to offer your clients a consistently world-class service. To do this, you need to have maximum control over as much of the customer experience as possible - and that means writing your own software.

Prior to joining Krystal, the team at aTech had been writing exceptional software for us for years, including Onyx, the UK’s fastest Wordpress Hosting and Katapult, the UK’s home-grown answer to Public Clouds like AWS. aTech also shared our values, commitment to excellence and ambition to become a global company, so it seemed only right that we should be working even closer together.

Over the past year the team at aTech have aligned so perfectly with us that it’s hard to imagine them ever not being a part of the family. And we’ve achieved so much together already.

World-class solutions

This was a pivotal development on our journey to becoming a UK company with a truly global reach. aTech brought with them with not only deep technical expertise but also a raft of intelligent solutions, including:

• Dial 9 - VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) for businesses of all shapes and sizes.
• Codebase - Code hosting for Git, Mercurial and Subversion repositories.
• DeployHQ - A service packed with features to help you automate and manage the continuous deployment of your websites.
• Sirportly - Powerful helpdesk software that helps you provide better customer support.
• Landline Anywhere - National or local landline numbers that divert calls straight to your mobile.

With this world-class software now forming part of the Krystal suite of solutions, we’ve been able to accelerate our growth while providing maximum value to our clients… and there’s more to come.

Enhanced capability

Thanks to the additional expertise that aTech has brought to Krystal’s development capabilities, we’ve also been able to develop new services and upgrades more efficiently and at greater scale. Now known as “Krystal Labs” (k.io), we’ve grown the software team 50% (and we’re still hiring!) and have pushed through countless improvements and new services over the past year.

Here are just a few of the projects that Krystal Labs has successfully delivered over the past 12 months:

• New Katapult features, including Katapult Load Balancers, Katapult DNS, Katapult Certificate Manager
• Graphene - our open-source graphing toolkit
• Developing and launching our new Krystal Affiliate system
• A new DNS management platform to power our new anycast DNS service.

An exciting future

It’s been a fantastic first year and we’re thrilled to be able to celebrate aTech coming on board to help us develop the world’s best software solutions. We’re always working hard to improve our offering and there’s more in the pipeline, including a powerful new tool to optimise website performance and improve search rankings...so watch this space!