From a Village Without Electricity to Software Running in 190 Countries
The osTicket Origin Story
I started using osTicket about 15 years ago to manage my IT support business. 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's built on top of it.
For years I've been curious about the origins. Who made this thing? How did it start? But whenever I poked around, I didn't 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 didn't 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.
From New Orleans to Alexandria
After graduating around 2001, Rotich ended up in Alexandria, Louisiana. In 2005, Hurricane Katrina hit. He'd 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."
Twenty years later, it runs in tens of thousands of organizations across 190+ countries. All from a house on 5th Street in Alexandria.
The team in Alexandria
For years Peter ran osTicket essentially solo. That changed in the early 2010s as the project grew.
Chloe Bowman joined as a Customer Success Specialist and is now the Customer Success Manager, with about eight years on the team. Internally she's known as the "Controller of Chaos," handling onboarding, demos, support, and everything in between. If you've scheduled a demo or worked through a SupportSystem issue, you've 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. Outside work she's into travel, photography, and visiting random coffee shops.
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 — a pattern you'll see again in a moment.
The one we know from the forums
For those of us who spend time in the osTicket forums or GitHub issues, KevinTheJedi has become the face of the project. He's 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.
Here's the story I'd never heard until recently.
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'd 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'm the one who made all those weird kangaroo avatars some of you might be using today.") He taught himself to code. Today he's the Senior Software Developer and the public face of osTicket for most of us in the community.
Full circle
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've hired developers, designers, and operations staff, many from local universities like Kabarak. osTicket v2 is actively in development with this expanded team.
A kid from a village without electricity built software used by millions of people worldwide. Now he's creating tech jobs on two continents.
And somehow, after all these years, the company is still bootstrapped. No venture capital. No outside investors. Just a house in Alexandria and a new office in Kenya.
I don't know Peter or Kevin personally. I've just been a user and a beneficiary of their work for a long time. But I thought this story deserved to be told in one place, because I couldn't find it anywhere else.
