The Shack Group - History
The Shack Group was founded in 1996 by Andrew Shackleton in Perth, Australia. For the first four years, Andrew worked with emerging internet technologies, building new websites for Australian businesses who had never had an online presence before. The early days involved a lot of development work with corporations establishing in-house LAN networks and building IT departments from the ground up. It was during this period that Perth Print Design was formed, providing desktop publishing and graphic art services to the public, and building a team of professional designers.
The Shack Group maintained an early focus on systems administration and network security for online business ventures. The result of this work was increased service relationships with the Australian finance sector. Andrew developed a plan to move the Shack Group into full time development of merchant account protocols that would focus on secure credit card processing. He began to implement the Shack Group VPN, and founded two new companies, Siphem and Navaro Solutions, to drive this vision.
The Shack Group began to offer full service media account management through Touch and Click in early 2002, providing world class online publishing services for Australian businesses. By this time the company VPN was in full development, and within another three years it would go public to provide the security infrastructure of all the servers in the Shack Group data centres. The Shack Group maintained two distinct data facilities in Australia at this stage, working on ecommerce and secure online communication platforms for corporations.
In 2004, telephony became a major focus of the Shack Group, and we began leading the development of local IP-PBX systems and VoIP implementation. The success of the Siphem and Navaro Solutions divisions expanded to take on Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) accounts. Partnerships within the Australian financial services community were brought forth with new web sites and ecommerce offerings. The Shack Group also began retail sales of consumer electronics that provided secure network communications and personal VoIP communication to clients.
By 2006, plans began to merge the two major data centres under the Shack Group aegis to one state of the art facility in Perth. The last two years have also seen the Shack Group open extended online sales of telephony systems, and expand its web development and design portfolio. Decisions were made to specialize in data encryption, secure data backup, and recovery services based upon the needs of corporate clients under contract. These services were then made public through the launch of RackHost and Big Internet Backup online.
As 2008 began, the Shack Group entered active plans to expand to the European Union and China, offering merchant protection services for ecommerce, virtual private networks for businesses, and telephony solutions for international communications. The year also saw the opening of the Perth Data Centre, and the launch of several new web sites. The Shack Group formed a new company, Email Solutions, to change the way people do email and communicate online, using the latest Web 2.0 standards. The company also began offering home automation and security solutions to the public.
As the Shack Group looks to the future, we see continued expansion of our market share in web publishing, remote hosting, telephony solutions, and network security for online businesses. The company is making plans to begin offering services in corporate IT training and vocational computing classes for students in Australia. We plan to enter the telecommunication sector in North Africa in 2009, and continue our financial services offerings in the EU by opening a new office in London.