History

Start of Vancis

Vancis Advanced ICT Services BV has been raised in 2008 as a subsidiary of SARA Computing and Networking Services. The start of Vancis emerged from the need to create a clear separation between the commercial services and the activities SARA performs as national institute for High Performance Computing and Networking.

The foundation of Vancis is a logical step, and will result in the development of both companies – SARA and Vancis BV – with their own characteristics. Vancis will make use of the know-how, experience and ICT infrastructure of SARA. For SARA, Vancis is an opportunity to disseminate the results of (international) technology projects.

Some history of SARA

In 1971, the year of the foundation, the main activities of SARA (original name: Stichting Academisch Rekencentrum Amsterdam), focused on data processing for mainly the Amsterdam universities (University of Amsterdam and Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam). Gradually, other universities and research institutes started using SARA’s advanced facilities in supercomputing, data storage, networking and visualization.

In the 1990s, the use of Internet by non-academic users grew extremely. Due to the presence of the Internet backbone at the premises where SARA is based, and the fact that SARA is one of the locations of the Amsterdam Internet Exchange (AMS-IX), more and more organizations – among which ISPs and Telcos – wanted to house their equipment at SARA.

Because of SARA’s experience in operational management of advanced IT systems, many enterprises and organizations became interested in hosting and other services of SARA. As a consequence, SARA’s commercial revenues increased. As from 2009, these commercial services will be shifted to Vancis BV.