As was promised in the last newsletter, we have an announcement to make. Catalyst Solutions operations are now in the cloud… and not just any cloud, the Catalyst Cloud!

Some of you may have heard back in December and January that Catalyst Solutions was the recipient of an Iowa Department of Economic Development Supply Chain Development program (that is a mouthful!). This is a project I have been working on for a couple years and it came to fruition through a collaboration I put together between Catalyst Solutions, Long Lines and Dealerbuilt Technologies. We added another company, AppCore to the team and we now have in place at the Siouxland Data Center (Long Lines, located at the Western Iowa Tech campus) a ‘cloud platform.’ More to come with respect to explaining what a cloud platform is in a later newsletter. Suffice it to say we no longer have the information we use to run our business in our building… it is in the cloud.

In addition to Catalyst, with the collaboration of Dealerbuilt Technologies, we are also hosting almost 400 users of a major car dealership located in the South Eastern United States. We went live on July 11th with about 100 users and have added 100 users every successive Monday. It has been quite a ride, proving our cloud design and making adjustments to satisfy both Dealerbuilt and the car dealership. A lot of time and effort, with the payoff being the development of knowledge and skills that will prepare Catalyst Solutions to serve our customers through this next evolution in technology, the Cloud.