“Why does ITmanager.net have games in the app store?” is frequently asked by our users. The answer to this question begins with our CEO and President, Paul Dumais and David MacFarlane.
The two started their journey as the creators of the first successful remote network admin app, Idokorro Mobile Admin between 2002 and 2008. Idokorro Mobile Admin gave access to mobile IT administration that BlackBerry users had never experienced before. In 2008, Paul and Dave decided to join BlackBerry and were responsible for creating BlackBerry App World which was launched on April 1, 2009.
While working for BlackBerry, they noticed that many popular iPhone and Android apps were not available on BlackBerry because BlackBerry had a much smaller market share and building apps for BlackBerry was more difficult at the time. Apps like YouTube, Instagram, Angry Birds and Plants vs Zombies were hugely popular but were not available on BlackBerry.
Joining forces with Co-Founder Krista House, they started Smarter Apps in 2010 and began making apps and games initially for BlackBerry but eventually for iOS and Android as well. These apps were downloaded by tens of millions of users all over the world and are still used by millions of people today.
The declining market share of BlackBerry in 2012 and the rise of Android and the iPhone was an opportunity to create a mobile-first set of network administration tools for IT Administrators. The Smarter Apps team decided to go back to their roots and focus all their efforts on creating the best all-in-one network administration service.
The product was called ITmanager.net and initially only supported remote administration of Google Apps and Amazon Web Services. The first version of ITmanager.net was released in October of 2012 and the company officially changed it’s name to ITmanager.net in February of 2014.
Today, popular games by Smarter Apps like Angry Farm, Zombie Attack, Little Generals, and InstaPhoto are still available in app stores. The existing Smarter Apps games provided a revenue stream funding the initial development of the ITmanager.net product. Today the team is solely focused on improving the ITmanager.net platform and giving network administrators the best product possible.
