Ulanji began its life in 1996 as a local Internet Service Provider (ISP) in Charleston, SC named Dynamic Consulting. For the first three years of its existence, Dynamic focused on providing family-friendly dial up access and low ratio business and dedicated connections. By 1999 Dynamic had grown to become one of the two largest providers in greater Charleston. With the emergence of broadband connections, Dynamic shifted its focus to website hosting and custom website application development. Then in the Spring of 2000, while working on a custom database project with another local Internet company, the principles of both companies decided that the logical extension of this joint project was to merge to form an application development company and Application Services Provider (ASP).

Digital Pitch also got its start in 1996 as New Media Marketing (N2MC), an Internet-based marketing and promotions firm. In 1998, after a partnership restructuring, N2MC emerged as a firm focused on driving traffic to client websites. The re-focused company was renamed Digital Pitch. This new business model proved successful for clients, who soon demanded that Digital Pitch not only work on the “back end” of the business marketing websites, but also to take that knowledge of what works with visitors and search engines and use it to build sites from the ground up. By the Spring of 2000 Digital Pitch had built a reputation for having a unique and successful approach to making successful websites. Digital Pitch clients included a large supermarket chain, an International fine leather goods maker and several industrial concerns that engaged in international B2B.

In 1999, Digital Pitch was engaged by the parent of the dominant TV station in the Charleston market to create an Internet concept that would prove profitable to the station. Digital Pitch developed a shopping portal concept to be promoted and sold by the TV station and administered by the participating retailers. With concept approval, development of the portal and its back end technology began. At roughly the same time, Digital Pitch moved its servers to Dynamic Consulting and began using Dynamic programmers on small projects.

The shopping portal project never made it out of beta, primarily due to wholesale management changes at the TV station. Fortunately, what at that moment seemed like unmitigated disaster was in fact the conception of Ulanji.


Birth of Ulanji

Aware that the shopping portal had met an untimely demise, Dynamic approached Digital Pitch with a resurrection proposal and a partnership was born. Digital Pitch would seek to acquire another local media partner to handle the promotion of the portal and Dynamic would re-develop the underlying applications to make the product more robust and easier to use. After three months of work together, executives in both firms realized that the work being done by Dynamic programmers went far beyond what was necessary for a local shopping portal. In fact, the logical extension of the work begun was an ASP that could deliver very sophisticated Internet-based applications to two distinct markets: small businesses like the vendors who participated in the earlier beta test, and Internet firms like Digital Pitch.

To test the premise that web designers could use this "engine" technology to speed their work and improve their offerings, and to add Digital Pitch’s marketing expertise to its technical prowess, Dynamic Consulting purchased its smaller partner. Ulanji was born.

Ulanji Today

Since the summer of 2000 Ulanji has continued to improve both its technology and its knowledge of how that technology can be best utilized. With the launch of version 2.0 of the Ulanji n-jine in August of 2000, Ulanji embarked on a path to dramatically improve the speed at which quality websites can be built and the ease with which they can be managed. The initial beta testers for 2.0 were two of Ulanji’s largest clients. Since then, the n-jine has been used to build, manage and host some 50 freestanding websites and 150 portal-driven microsites.

In keeping with the business model, Ulanji set out to capture a significant share of the local web development market. Not only did Ulanji gain signficant market share in Charleston, but the company was able to test the n-Jine technology in real world situations. While there are no official statistics regarding website transactions in the greater Charleston, SC MSA, Ulanji does believe its technology and approach to building Internet sites have made it one of the largests developer in the area.

In January of 2002 Ulanji launched n-jine version 3.5. This version allowed Ulanji to enter the portal building business. A restaurant portal was immediately launched in Myrtle Beach, SC in conjunction with TV station WPDE. Another is scheduled to launch in April and will be promoted by Clear Channel Communications' 6 radio stations in Charleston, SC.

Version 3.6 - with its 45 application modules, automated error checking, new hardware and faster database was released on time in April 2003, followed by Version 4.0 with a new, higher speed and more resilient database engine, in December 2004.