It's a Deal
We can finally take the wraps off something we have been cooking up for a while. Raincity Studios has acquired Bryght (press release)! The expanded company will operate under the Raincity Studios banner and the Bryght name will live on through the hosting products (i.e. Bryght Light Sites and Bryght Virtual Private Servers will continue). Raincity Studios will also continue Bryght's work in leading edge technology like Jabber / XMPP and OpenID. And of course, all Bryght guys are now Raincity guys!
Looking forward by looking a wee back
The Bryght Guys first met Robert Scales, Mark Yuasa and the Raincity Studios folks at a New Media BC "Building 21st Century websites" event way back in November 18, 2004 (here's photographic evidence). Amazing to think that was almost exactly three years ago.
Over the years, we have had an incredible amount of success with websites and other joint projects with Bryght providing Drupal infrastructure and best practices expertise and Raincity providing project management, design, theming, and PHP coding. Our first joint success was the over 100 sites (running the full gamut from '"normal" corporate websites to online web communities) that Raincity launched on the Bryght hosted service platform in the first year and a half of our partnership. Raincity Studios were the first to understand the power and business opportunity of customized instant push button Drupal site creation. Bryght pioneered this with our Hostmaster project which lives on in Drupal 5 install profiles and the currently being developed Hostmaster 2 project .
And with all the hard work we somehow find time to mix business with fun; for example the fun parties we have thrown at SXSW 2006 and 2007 with our friends from Newsvine and Blue Flavor and hanging out together at numerous Drupal and Web 2.0 / Social Media events like OSCON, DrupalCon Brussels 2006, DrupalCon Barcelona 2007 and Blog World Expo 2007. Looking back on it all, it is remarkable what we have accomplished "pre-unification".
The Future
It is a great relief to finally be in a team of both Raincity Guys and Gals!
Look to Raincity to keep launching even more great web applications, web sites and products made possible by our combined 22 person "Drupal Dream Team". Nothing changes with respect to Drupal; we will continue giving back and paying forward to the Drupal open source community; in fact we plan on expanding our community involvement.
The Raincity team especially with the expansion to China is too big for us to give a shout out to each and every member. The Bryght guys are quite "chuffed", as the British say, to join Raincity as full fledged colleagues. We know Robert for his open source business and team building savvy, Mark for his creative direction on the many sites running on our servers, Mariska for her operational excellence, Francis for his Drupal coding and best practices knowledge, Erik for his project management expertise that has led to many many successful site launches, Social Media maven Dave Olson and we are rapidly discovering the talents of the entire team including recent newcomers like Alex Rollin. Finally, we are very much looking forward to working with our new colleagues in Shanghai.
Thanks!
This is a great time to thank the people who have helped us along the way. Thanks to our customers and clients who have challenged us and supported us the whole way! Thanks to all past and present employees of both Bryght and Raincity Studios. Thanks to our families for understanding the hard hours we have put in to make the two companies and now the new unified company a success. A special thanks to our investors. And thanks to the entire Drupal world wide software development community; we truly stand on the shoulders of greats and Raincity could not exist without Drupal.
