Who The Heck Is Jeff?
My name is Jeff Rodgers. I get asked a lot when I answer the phone, "Are you the Jeff that owns the company?". Well, yes, I am. My friends (and the occasional customer) like to give me a hard time about naming the company after myself. "Isn't that a little vain?", I'm asked. I guess, maybe a little, but I'm not a vain person, and it was never my intention to build a company with my first name so prominently displayed. Also, have you ever heard of Dell, Hewlett Packard, Ford? At least I didn't call the company just "Jeff". Haha.The short answer to the name of the company was, it was 1996, and jeff-net.com was the first domain I ever registered. I did it just as a personal website. No more, no less. In early 1997 I purchased the domain Crystal-Reports.Com with an idea of seeing if I could market training and consulting on the internet for Crystal Reports. I put some links on it for that, and I put the 'parent' company logo on it as 'Jeff-Net'. Well, my story is one like so many you've heard about things starting small and taking off. That's what happened with Crystal-Reports.Com, and before I knew it, Jeff-Net had become known as a great resource for Crystal Reports expertise. That was about ten years ago, and we're still growing strong. Since then, we've added a number of technical sites to our family of websites, but reporting and report automation, has become our biggest specialty. We are reporting experts, and that is primarily what 'Jeff-Net' has become known for. So, all that said, there's no changing our name now. :-) And, of course, our Report Runner brand of Crystal Reports tools have become very well known around the world. We have customers on literally every continent except Antarctica. Haha. What's up with that??? Our software works in cold weather, too.
So, for those of you who have emailed me wanting to know a little more about me, here is just small bit of information. I am the lead developer of the software that we market, our Report Runner Viewer and Report Runner Batch products. By the way, I value all of your (our customers) input. It has made both of our products better over the years. As far as other things I am involved in, I produce independent films. I am very active in my church, Celebration Fellowship, where I have played drums on the worship team for the past 10 years. To "give back" to the world, one of the things we do as a company is offer free website hosting to missionaries. Information about that can be found here. Lastly, we recently began marketing a report conversion service, for customers wanting to move from Crystal Reports to Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services. The website can be found at RptToRdl.Com.
Once again, I welcome your comments, and I love hearing from our customers (and potential customers). Click below to email me directly:
If you want to see old, REALLY old (and ugly) versions of Jeff-Net.Com or Crystal-Reports.Com, check out The Internet Archive and search on those domains. They have snapshots of websites taken at various dates. I sure hope you like the current website(s) better than the old one. Haha.