Free Willy!
As you all know, as we announced here on the UAG Team Blog site a few weeks ago, UAG’s “grand-father” product named e-Gap has reached its “end of support” date on July 13th. Obviously, as a result of this, many of our long time customers are in the process of upgrading or have already upgraded to UAG.
A couple of weeks ago I had the honor to be invited back to one of these devoted customers (who prefers to remain undisclosed), who has been running a complex deployment of well over two dozen e-Gap appliances for about 7 or 8 years now. During these years I had the great pleasure to work very closely and over extended periods of time with the team of engineers constantly developing new functionalities and maintaining these e-Gap appliances. The array of e-Gap appliances is actually known and referred to at this customer organization as: “the Whales” (for those of you that are not that familiar with the UAG history, e-Gap was originally created by a company named Whale Communications 
, which was acquired by Microsoft). This time though, they did not invite me there in my capacity as e-Gap/IAG/UAG consultant, but instead to participate at a small event: to celebrate the years of service these “Whales” have provided access to this organization’s resources, and to mark the imminent release of the Whales from their daily duties, as they will be soon gradually retired and replaced by UAG servers.
I was truly touched to see how this group of engineers who have worked several years with the Whales, some of them since the very beginning of the project at this organization, have developed such a level of loyalty to the product that they thought about having this event, and even went to the extent to have a cake custom-made especially for this occasion (a cake which, I must admit, was very sweet and very tasty):
To the undisclosed customer’s “Whale Team” I want to say again that I was very happy and honored to be invited to attend this celebration, and that I look forward for many more years of working together and bringing out the best possible features and customizations out of your UAG deployment. Happy UAG-ing!
--------------------------
Ran Dolev, Senior Program Manager