Hammerhead Technologies is an ISV currently based in Singapore. The company was started with the aim of simplifying IT for small businesses in Phuket but with prior experience of working at Microsoft and experience of developing for the Microsoft Windows Azure platform the company started by creating an easy way for small businesses to deploy and maintain their own websites. The founders of Hammerhead Technologies, David Brooks and Jon Roberts, are both qualified PADI Open Water Scuba Instructors and started a dive center in Phuket called Yellow Submarine Divers. Needing a website for the dive center the team started exploring the possible options; in the end deciding that it would be financially more sensible for David to use his IT background to create the website himself. Wanting a solution that Jon could update with dive trips, diving courses and prices David created a solution that was based on a self-built CMS. With this idea Hammerhead CMS was born. It became apparent that all of the dive centers in Phuket had the same problem with their websites. It was a challenge for the people running dive centers to find a reliable company to create and maintain their website. Without the necessary skills to update their own website, each dive center owner was forced to pay a web developer to make even the simplest changes. Phuket dive centers we’re also struggling with the challenges of SEO. Many dive center owners had paid SEO ‘experts’ to help promote their website with little or no success. By building SEO features into Hammerhead CMS the product made it possible for dive centers to take control of their own SEO and allowed them to target specific markets with their services and products. This lead to Hammerhead CMS being sold as a service to Phuket dive centers and then in broader geographic regions. Hammerhead CMS is continually being developed with additional features being added to allow other business areas to make sure of the service. Although Hammerhead Technologies started by focusing on the recreational dive industry theplatform has been further developed to meet the requirements of many other markets such as restaurants, dive retail outlets, yacht chartering and liveabords. The Microsoft Windows Azure platform is flexible enough for Hammerhead CMS to be easily adapted with extra components for other markets. With quickly deployment times and proven SEO results from a simple to use control panel, Hammerhead CMS is fast becoming a low cost, quick and easy way for a small business to have a presence on the internet that works for them while also producing a quick return on investment.
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