Company History
Discover the milestones that shaped our company
A Hollywood History
With a background in telecommunications from the U.S. Navy, Digital Boardwalk CEO Tim Shoop set off to Los Angeles, California in 1995 to pursue his dream of acting. However, Tim was captivated by the entrepreneurial spirit of Silicon Valley. This led him to one of the fastest growing IT companies in the area. After four years of providing IT services to the film industry and multiple Fortune 500 companies, he decided to take his experience and entrepreneurial ideas back home to Pensacola, Florida.
Break-Fix IT
Following the launch of New Vision Computers, Tim acquired numerous large government contracts that catapulted his retail chain to a whole new level. Although New Vision Computers focused on the consumer market, it also gained a large business customer base by providing high quality fixed-fee services.
After eight years, Tim predicted a changing industry, especially for businesses. The reactive model for IT support simply wasn’t cost-effective for businesses and it lead to massive amounts of downtime and lost productivity. With the widespread adoption of broadband internet as well as the advent of remote support technologies, he knew the method which IT support could be provided was evolving. With all these changes on the horizon, and a plethora of new business ideas, Tim set off on a new project, Digital Boardwalk.
A Red Door
As many of the world’s largest tech companies have stories of how they were incubated in the confines of a drab garage, Digital Boardwalk too has this kind of story. But rather than a garage, Digital Boardwalk was born inside a glorified hallway in the back of a retail store, right next to a public bathroom. Contrary to the austere environment that lay behind it, a bright red door embodied the optimistic and innovative development that took place in this small hallway.
Tim was joined by co-founder Brian Wilkey in 2008, and together they worked tirelessly on their idea for a new breed of IT support. At the time, the managed IT services industry was just beyond its infancy and several IT companies adopted the new concepts that managed IT introduced. The flaw was that many of these companies didn’t take the time to truly embrace the new values “managed IT” stood for, and they fell back on their traditional reactive service models.
The partners sought to create a company that is founded on the ideologies, benefits and values of Managed IT and also addressed the poor customer service and slow response times that plagued the industry.
After 18 months of rigorous research, development, beta trials, and integration of multiple software platforms, Digital Boardwalk was officially incorporated in 2009. By leveraging state-of-the-art software solutions, as well the Cloud, Digital Boardwalk was able to automate nearly 70% of the arduous processes required to run a service business. This meant that we could dedicate the majority of our internal resources to customer service and supporting our clients. The time devoted up-front to perfecting the business model and workflow processes allowed us to directly focus on providing the industry’s fastest response times.
Award-winning Services
Since its conception, Digital Boardwalk has constantly evolved to meet the demanding and ever-changing needs of businesses and the IT industry. Without straying from our roots, our consistent evolution, innovation, and commitment to customer service has projected us far ahead of the competition. In 2022, we were proud to announce that Digital Boardwalk was ranked the no. 8 managed IT services provider in the world on the prestigious MSP 501 list by Channel Futures..
We are thankful for all of our clients, partners, and our wonderful staff for helping to make Digital Boardwalk the success it is today.