A Holistic Approach: Sevaa Group Delivers Experience-Based, Turnkey Hosting and IT Management Solutions Aligned with Business Goals

TL; DR: Sevaa Group leverages more than 18 years of hosting and development experience to deliver personalized, end-to-end infrastructure and management solutions. The Atlanta-based company is focused on mitigating risks and driving success through close partnerships with clients and recently released an intuitive control panel to make IT management that much easier. Committed to supporting both local and open-source communities, Sevaa is pushing the industry forward through a passion for people.

Sanskrit, an ancient Indian language dating back to the second millennium BCE, is often referred to as “the mother of all languages” due to its significant influence on Hindi, Austronesian, Sino-Tibetan, and Southeast Asian communication. With a rich grammatical structure and extensive vocabulary, Sanskrit has spawned volumes of literature in the areas of poetry, drama, religion, philosophy, and astrology, among other genres.

Both Hindi and Sanskrit are known for smooth sounds that are pleasing to hear. Seva (pronounced say-va) is a Sanskrit word describing the spiritual practice of selfless service performed to assist and uplift others.

In 2001, a hosting company in Atlanta was searching for a way to represent its goals and aspirations when it stumbled upon the Sanskrit term. “Selfless service is the perfect way to describe our devotion to customers,” said Randall Kent, Director at Sevaa Group.

Today, the company honors the noble sentiment behind its name (to which they’ve added an extra “a”) by pairing technical expertise with consistent, high-quality customer service.

“Between the customer service and the depth of experience our team has, we’re able to provide a holistic solution in which we have a deep understanding of their environment and what problems they have,” Randall said. “Although what we’re doing is highly technical, we make sure to provide transparency by distilling the service into friendly terms.”

Sevaa’s focus on building and maintaining close client relationships helps mitigate risks and drive project success. With a portfolio of hosting, development, and professional IT management solutions — including a new control panel — the company can solve a range of problems. Much like the company’s devotion to customer satisfaction, Sevaa’s support of open-source and local communities speaks to the origins of its name.

Sevaa serves a broad spectrum of customers, from mom-and-pop shops and midmarket organizations to enterprise-level accounts, across a variety of verticals. “We work with a lot of nonprofits, higher education institutes, accountants, and law firms,” Randall said. “We find that we are aligned with their desire for that high-touch type of relationship — that’s what resonates with them.”

But Randall said the company “plays well in the sandbox” with a variety of users. “We’re willing to jump in with an existing team or environment, perform a gap analysis, and fill in the missing pieces,” he said. “At the end of the day, our clients are getting a full, end-to-end solution between us and the internal resources they choose to use.”

Times have certainly changed since 2001, and Sevaa hasn’t been blind to the fluctuations. When the company first entered the market, it focused on affordable shared hosting solutions. But as the web evolved and new content management solutions rose in popularity, Sevaa began to concentrate on development to optimize its platforms for WordPress and Drupal.

The company also turned its attention to creating specialized managed hosting environments. “Nowadays, you name it, we do it,” Randall said. “Colocation, dedicated, VPS, private clouds — we’ve embraced all the changes over the years as we focus on the best ways to partner with our customers.”

Randall told us the company’s decades of experience in the hosting industry provides inside knowledge on how to keep networks running smoothly and securely. “We use our experience to determine the right configurations for our client networks, whether they need a shared account or multizone deployment with redundant failover solutions,” he said. “Having all of those capabilities in our toolbelt helps us drive people to the right solution.”

Sevaa’s devotion to selfless service has allowed the company to build lasting client relationships, as reflected in its high retention rates. According to Randall, Sevaa specializes in providing personalized solutions intended to exceed customer expectations through consistently high-quality service. The company’s ultimate goal is to provide a consultative process that both mitigates risk and ensures business success.

“We take in a lot of folks from creative agencies who build a website for the customer and then wipe their hands clean of it,” he said. “They go from not knowing anything about a website to being 100% responsible for it. We help them get back to their comfort zone so that they can focus on their business.”

When Randall says the company maintains close client relationships, he’s not exaggerating. Most clients on managed plans can contact the team members responsible for their accounts directly via their cellphones. The company also offers traditional support channels. The idea is to allow customers to seek assistance through whatever means they choose.

“We found over the years that most of our users prefer to shoot us a quick email or make a quick call rather than log into a portal to create a ticket and categorize it appropriately,” he said. “We want to make the process easy for them.”

Sevaa’s high-quality IT management services also come backed by a 100% uptime guarantee. “There’s an alignment between the depth of our technology and the people side of things,” Randall said. “It all bubbles up into the overall customer experience.”

Randall is especially excited about the company’s new control panel, which Sevaa developed to provide customers with the ability to access and modify system settings. He jokes that what the control panel lacks in its uncreative name is made up for through its robust functionality.

Randall said the control panel is incredibly unique and makes users feel empowered to quickly complete complex tasks through the power of automation.

“It’s a desktop application with a graphical user interface (GUI) customers can use to manage their local development environment with Docker under the hood,” he said. “When they work on their local environment, they can commit it and merge into the staging branch, and that automatically deploys it to the staging environment. Then they can merge it into the master, and that automatically deploys it to the production environment.”

The product came into fruition as a result of customer feedback. Sevaa’s goal, which is in line with its promise to provide selfless service, is to optimize processes whenever possible for the betterment of the customer.

The approach is paying off.

“Sevaa’s arsenal of development skills are unmatched,” said client Shelly Hoffman, Executive VP at Marbury Creative Group, in a testimonial on the Sevaa site. “They develop beautiful content management systems that are easy to use. A great web partner!”

As with any open-source project, Drupal relies on a diverse community of volunteers to drive the CMS forward. To that end, Randall told us Sevaa does whatever it can to support them.

Sevaa will even have a presence at DrupalCon 2019, held in the nature-filled mecca that is Seattle on April 8-12, 2019.

“We’re excited to go out there and continue supporting the community,” he said.

Locally, Sevaa sponsors JavaScript Meetups, Drupal Camps, and WordCamps to help the community and prove that Sevaa is living up to its name.