The osTicket Origin Story

I started using osTicket about 15 years ago. It transformed how I handled customer service and made life much easier for myself and those I work with. Somewhere along the way I built a little side hustle selling a responsive theme for it. So the software has been good to me, both as a user and as someone who has built on top of it.

For years I have been curious about the origins. Who made this thing? How did it start? But whenever I poked around, I did not find much. A few forum posts. Some sparse bios. Nothing that told the whole story.

Recently I decided to dig deeper. And what I found surprised me — and I thought I should share it.

A Village Without Electricity

Peter Rotich was born in 1978 in Kolong, a rural village in Kenya's Rift Valley. No electricity. No running water. He did not touch a computer until college .

What he did have was speed. Rotich was a distance runner, good enough to earn a scholarship to Tulane University in New Orleans in the late 1990s. He ran the 1500m in 3:50, competed on an NCAA Championship-qualifying cross country team, and somehow found time to major in Computer Engineering with minors in Electrical Engineering and Mathematics.

Think about that. First time using a computer, in college, while running Division I track, while studying engineering.

Born and raised in rural Kenya, Rotich has been on the entrepreneurial path since the young age of nine. He studied Computer Engineering at Tulane University and has been designing and building enterprise software for over two decades [citation:4].

From New Orleans to Alexandria

After graduating around 2001, Rotich ended up in Alexandria, Louisiana. In 2005, Hurricane Katrina hit. He had already started building osTicket by then, a simple PHP/MySQL ticketing system designed to get customer support "out of a shared email inbox and off post-it notes."

The software was free. It worked. Word spread. By the late 2000s, osTicket was being downloaded hundreds of thousands of times. Linux.com called it "one of the finest ticketing systems I have used."

osTicket was initially released in 2003 [citation:2]. Twenty years later, it runs in tens of thousands of organizations across 190+ countries [citation:5]. All from a house on 5th Street in Alexandria.

And somehow, after all these years, the company is still bootstrapped. No venture capital. No outside investors [citation:9]. Just a house in Alexandria and a new office in Kenya [citation:5].

The Team in Alexandria

For years Peter ran osTicket essentially solo. That changed in the early 2010s as the project grew.

The Enhancesoft team — the people behind osTicket

Chloe Bowman joined as a Customer Success Specialist and is now the Customer Success Manager, with about eight years on the team. Internally she is known as the "Controller of Chaos," handling onboarding, demos, support, and everything in between. If you have scheduled a demo or worked through a SupportSystem issue, you have probably dealt with Chloe.

Latesha Harts is a Customer Success Specialist who joined in 2023, working alongside Chloe on onboarding, implementation, and training. Another Alexandria native and Northwestern State alum, she came to Enhancesoft from an education background.

Adriane Alexander is a Senior Software Developer handling backend development and documentation. An Alexandria native with a CS degree from Northwestern State, she came to Enhancesoft with Salesforce and mainframe experience. Outside work she plays bass guitar and does archery.

Anthony Henderson is a Senior Frontend Developer currently leading the effort to modernize osTicket's frontend tech stack. Originally from West Virginia, he started his career in graphic design before pivoting to software.

Marvin Mokua is a Senior Front-End Engineer from Eldoret, Kenya, currently working on the second iteration of osTicket. A graduate of Kabarak University, he describes himself as a "young and hungry front-end engineer" [citation:4].

Bashir, also from Kenya, is a generalist at heart drawn to anything that runs on code. With a background in cybersecurity and infrastructure engineering, he builds secure, reliable systems and is currently diving into Rust [citation:4].

Kevin the Jedi: The Face of the Project

For those of us who spend time in the osTicket forums or GitHub issues, KevinTheJedi has become the face of the project. He is the one posting release announcements, squashing bugs, answering questions. He does it with a speed and precision that makes it easy to forget he stumbled into coding rather than being born already logged into four terminals.

Kevin Thorne grew up in rural Louisiana, the kind of kid who took apart everything to see how it worked. He started college studying graphic arts at Northwestern State but hated the college experience. What he really wanted was art school, but that was out of reach financially. So he dropped out and ended up as a barista at his uncle's coffee shop.

One of the regulars was a guy who would come in and talk about software with his coworkers. Kevin would overhear these conversations and get curious. Eventually he worked up the nerve to ask: what do you actually do?

The regular was Peter Rotich.

Peter invited Kevin to visit the office. Kevin started as a graphic design intern. ("Yes, I am the one who made all those weird kangaroo avatars some of you might be using today.") He taught himself to code. Today he is the Senior Software Developer and the public face of osTicket for most of us in the community.

Full Circle: Back to Kenya

After 26 years in the United States, Peter is expanding back to Kenya. Last year Enhancesoft opened an office in Eldoret — in the Rift Valley, not far from where Peter grew up — and roughly doubled the team. They have hired developers, designers, and operations staff, many from local universities like Kabarak [citation:4][citation:5]. osTicket v2 is actively in development with this expanded team.

The osTicket v2 rewrite is a major undertaking. The team is completely rewriting the codebase using a modern PHP framework (Laravel), modernizing the frontend with ReactJS, building a RESTful API, and making osTicket themeable and plugable [citation:6].

"We know we have got the work cut out for us, but we do have an adept team behind the project," Rotich wrote in the public roadmap announcement [citation:6].

A kid from a village without electricity built software used by millions of people worldwide. Now he is creating tech jobs on two continents.

Key Takeaways