Our favourite story to tell is the one where a deceptively simple “garage project” blossomed into Enhancesoft and the products we know today. So whenever someone asks how it all began, we can’t help but return to the classic chicken-and-egg riddle. Surely the parent company must have come first… or was it the products that hatched the need for a company?

The year is 2003, and our CEO and founder, Peter Rotich, is building a budding career in the tech industry. Life seems good — or at least as good as it can be for a diasporan working long hours, learning the ropes and navigating the expectations of a fast-paced corporate world. But in the middle of it all, one thing becomes painfully clear: the support operations in the company he works for, and across the industry at large, are nowhere near seamless.

Here’s how things worked back in the day, long before formal help desk systems:

1. A company sets up a shared support email account.
2. Access is given to one main individual whose job is largely to receive customer requests and manually forward them to the relevant person or department.
3. That department reviews the request, attempts a solution, drafts a response and sends it back to the human routing system.
4. The response is forwarded back to the customer.

As you can imagine, this caused delays, confusion and plenty of “fall through the cracks” moments. Conveniences we now take for granted — issue tracking, knowledgebases, collaboration — weren’t just missing… they weren’t even imagined yet.

Simply put, everything was a mess. The world of customer support desperately needed a hero.

Enter Peter, with his coding cape and what some might describe as magical fingers.

Peter saw an opportunity to unify the entire customer support management process. His life-changing insight revolved around one golden idea: email routing. He realised that centralising all requests — or support tickets as we now know them — into a shared inbox would change the game. So he got to coding, and everything else grew from that foundation:

What if we could assign ownership of every ticket?

What if we added tags, filters, a portal?

What if we created a locking mechanism so two agents wouldn’t work on the same ticket?

What if we added tasks to make follow-ups easier?

And so on. And so it grew.

The journey, while fulfilling, demanded more of him, just as with every classic origin story. He worked tirelessly to bring this idea to life, night after night, bug after bug, until the beloved osTicket finally emerged.

People embraced osTicket with open arms, and soon enough teams and companies around the world, from small organisations to global enterprises, were using it. It was an exciting time.

Eventually, as companies grew and their needs evolved, we saw an opportunity to provide a fully supported, hosted version of osTicket. And so, in 2010, SupportSystem was born.

Somewhere in between all this, as our user base grew and the product matured, it became clear that this was no longer just a side project — it needed a real home. So Enhancesoft was officially incorporated, giving our work structure, direction and a future. Soon enough, our team grew, our roles diversified and our little “garage project” found its first real office… then the next… and now, we’re proud to say, we have two.

I’ll give you the opportunity to read more of the inside scoop from one of his famous internal memos attached below. In this one, “Brand Focus and Clarity,” he goes deeper into this origin story far better than I ever could — hey, I’m just the Content Manager. But I hope this gives you a glimpse into how we came to be, and into the man behind the powerful platform we are building brick by brick.

There are many people who have been pivotal in this journey: occasional collaborators, open-source contributors with their suggestions, former employees who helped push the needle forward even an inch and clients who have stuck with us through the years. Sometimes they nudged (okay, bullied) us toward improvement. We appreciate you. Truly. And we look forward to a greater future together.

Our mission remains to continue improving the customer support experience by building an exceptional customer relationship management platform — one that empowers you to make happy customers, as has been our rallying call from the very beginning.

If you have fond memories of us from over the years, feel free to send us a message. We’d love to reminisce together.

P.S. The osTicket egg came first. The company followed. And then the company shaped what the product would become.