About Us

NASA Company Profile

The National Association of System Administrators (NASA), a premier provider of hardware maintenance and operating support, was founded in 1994 when the present CEO, John Blanchard, a former support center contractor for a leading original equipment manufacturer (OEM), decided to provide computer maintenance service for “the little guy.” Now NASA is proud to offer superlative service for a variety of valued customers, whose revenues range from $300,000 to $96 billion annually. Totals for 2005 show that NASA now has more than 35,000 serial numbers under contract throughout North America and Puerto Rico.

Blanchard used his last paycheck from IBM® to start the company, which recently has purchased a 24,000 square foot corporate headquarters located in Crystal Lake, Illinois. The company now boasts a staff of highly skilled technical specialists strategically located throughout the country to serve NASA’s customers, a 24-hour customer call center, and three private airplanes with pilots available to rush technical specialists and parts to customers experiencing a critical outage.

NASA started out with one customer in 1994, and Sportif USA is a valued member of the NASA family to this day. NASA now boasts a customer base that includes Creative Automation, Kelly Services, Consumers Energy, Northern Illinois University, Eastern Illinois University, several counties in Indiana, Baptist HealthCare and IBM. Blanchard is especially proud of the fact that in 11 years not one customer has canceled a NASA maintenance contract to return to the OEM for maintenance.

NASA’s maintenance product offerings also have expanded over the years. In the beginning, NASA maintained only IBM equipment. Now NASA provides hardware maintenance and operating support for most platforms, including HP/Compaq®, EMC®, Sun®, StorageTek® and Dell®.

In addition to standard maintenance contracts, NASA now offers disaster recovery testing, automatic call escalation, customer access to a web-based customer portal for case tracking, and NASAWatch™, a system management tool that continuously reports on the operational state of customers’ systems to maximize system availability.

In 2005, NASA added software development to its list of product offerings with a line of case management software under the umbrella name of NASATrack™. These products include CALLTrack™, which is designed for customer service departments, CASETrack™ for judicial entities such as village, county, state and tribal governments, and CARETrack™ for rehabilitation facilities.

Philanthropy is a big part of the NASA story. John Blanchard is a member of Angel Flight America (AFA), a non-profit, grassroots volunteer corps of more than 6,000 private pilots from all 50 states who transport patients and their families for free to hospitals for medical treatment. AFA members also provide free flights in the event of a national crisis or whenever there is a compelling human need.

Under Blanchard’s leadership, NASA created the non-profit NASA Education in September of 1999 to provide tuition for select, qualified applicants.

NASA Education’s newest program is Project Fresh Start, which provides vocational training for U.S. veterans who are displaced, disabled, homeless or otherwise in transition to prepare them for competitive wage occupations. NASA Education also sponsored the Stand Down for homeless veterans on October 2 and 3, 2006, at YMCA Camp Algonquin in McHenry County, Illinois, and will sponsor another of its semiannual Stand Downs in March, 2007.

NASA is a member of the Association for Services Management International (AFSM International), ISO 9001:2000 Certified and GSA Schedule holder; Contract # GS-35F-0728R.