Ron Vyse, our managing director, was one of those founding partners and throughout the years he has seen his company go from strength to strength. This milestone has given CSG the perfect opportunity to reflect on the history of the company and share its success with its valued customers, some of which have been with CSG since the beginning.
As part of a series of features to celebrate #30YearsOfCSG, Ron shares CSG’s story and explains why technology will always stand the test of time:
How it began
When the company was first set up in 1985, IT was still quite new, but we saw an opportunity to help businesses with their technology needs. Originally the company started with just selling stationary and doing IT maintenance, but after being a rewarded a Pegasus dealership in 1986 things started to change. This dealership was a natural acquirement for the company as two of the managers already had experience with Pegasus and it meant that we could not only support Pegasus programs but also sell them. In the early days we were purely a support company, supporting both software and hardware, and we didn’t try and sell a product. That was what made us different when we started, CSG didn’t sell computers, we just did pure maintenance.
Company growth
Once the company had acquired the Pegasus dealership, CSG then became a reseller for quite a few systems, including Apricot PC, which followed similar specifications to IBM’s PC. Consequently, we started to dip our toes into software and decided to sell IT as a business. There were challenges in the beginning as networking didn’t exist so it meant that every computer system was different, with none of them connecting together.
The complexities were a lot different to today, as in those days there were a lot of ideas and no standardisation until the IBM PC came out. Still, we managed to tackle those problems and soon we saw that technology advancements were becoming a lot more rapid, which meant we could grow with the developments. Our growth also meant that CSG were able to buy out the company we used to work for, Reeves Sigma Computers, in 1994.