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Only one other person showed up for the inaugural meeting of Bret Esquivel’s new computer club at Holy Cross Middle School in 1999, but that’s all the 7th grader would ever need. The sole attendee turned out to be his kindred spirit, future college roommate and current business partner Darren Kattan.
The young pair eventually selected a domain name for their own future IT business – Immense Networks – which at the time seemed very “pie in the sky.” Undeterred, they honed their IT skills over the ensuing years and later began setting up game networks and investigating behind-the-scenes elements of big IT companies. Then, while at LSU, they pulled the trigger and made Immense Networks official. “We vowed that if we could make enough money to eat, we would continue on this path and not take a ‘big boy’ job,” Esquivel jokes.
Their big break came in late 2005 when a school in post-Katrina New Orleans found itself with “pallets and pallets” of laptops and servers – paid for by hurricane relief funding – with no one to install them. Esquivel’s mother helped make the connection. “She was friends with someone at the school,” he says. “From there, one school became two, two became three, etc. It just snowballed.”
But it wasn’t until after graduating in 2008 that Esquivel and Kattan opened their first office in Baton Rouge and quickly began building a client base. They found that having computer science degrees and being able to write code made them somewhat unique in the IT space. It gave them a decided advantage, as they could solve a lot of problems that other companies couldn’t. Before long, they were doubling their revenue every year.
It’s all about trust
Today, the 20-year-old Baton Rouge-headquartered IT service provider has blossomed into a 40-person staff with a footprint stretching from New Orleans to Lake Charles – even globally when accounting for their self-created “ImmyBot” IT automation platform they began selling and supporting in 2020.
Along the way, Immense Networks has developed a reputation for providing innovative technology management solutions for a wide range of clients. The secret to their success? IT support is really all they’ve ever wanted to do. “We’re not just fixing a computer then going on our merry way,” Kattan says. “We take more of a consultancy approach. We want to find out how we can use technology to make your business better.”
They’re most excited about their ImmyBot platform, designed to streamline and manage software deployment and IT infrastructure processes. “Much of what we do can be very labor intensive, so we came to the realization that we could automate a lot of it,” says Kattan, the creator of the platform. The company began marketing ImmyBot after recognizing an urgent need among other IT providers. Today, more than 800 companies around the world use the platform, supported by a dedicated team at Immense Networks. “It’s growing insanely fast … by 12 percent every month over two years,” Kattan says.
Immense Networks is in a good place these days. They’re able to pay their employees well, so many of them have been with the company for more than a decade. They also know that should a problem arise, both Esquivel and Kattan have their backs and can help work a solution.
It boils down to trust, say the owners of Immense Networks. That’s why the company considers itself more as a partner or business associate than an IT service provider. “Trust is the nature of the business,” Esquivel says. “If we can’t establish that with our clients, we’re not doing our job right.”
Learn more at immense.net.
