Well we’ve been promising ourselves that we’d start a company blog for some time now so today’s the day to kick things off. I suppose I should start off with telling you a little about the company and us.

Charles and I set up Pro2col in 2003 sat in a pub in Southampton.  It wasn’t that late in the day and we’d had a few beers but we were sure that there was a gap in the market for us.

I’d just been made redundant by Savvis, who had recently bought WAM!NET.  They closed down the 4-Sight division of the WAM!NET business leaving the UK graphic arts industry with no supplier of off-the-shelf file transfer solutions (Hermstedt had pulled out of the UK in 2002).  Charles had been consulting for 4-Sight, worked for several leading Apple Mac resellers and worked with Apple as a consultant.  Together we had a good blend of technical, marketing and sales experience which we thought we’d try to put to good use.

Pro2col started life as a partnership but we soon found that things were going a little better than had been anticipated and Pro2col Limited was set up in February 2004.  Since then we’ve added some fantastic members to the team and been lucky enough to supply solutions to some amazing companies.

Our number one product by a country mile was Hermstedt’s StingRay file transfer server.  We’d installed several hundred in the UK and had many customers that we maintained their servers for so we were surprised to hear that Hermstedt AG (the manufacturer) had gone into administration in early 2007.

We knew the team there very well having worked with them closely for the past three years so Pro2col moved to acquire the products, trademarks, brand and manufacturing rights for the StingRay to ensure initially that production could at least continue.

Since then we’ve set up Pro2col Deutschland based in Mannheim headed by Anette Hermstedt servicing the German marketplace.  Our Development team is based in Germany and we’ve just released the first on many new developments for StingRay.

This blog is going to give you an insight into the team here and hopefully keep you informed on what’s going on with the StingRay and what useful bits of information we think you might find useful along the way.

I’m James by the way. Officially the MD but also general dogsbody and occasional teaboy.

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