The feverish renewal and wild new growth of spring seized not only the lush flora of Southern Alabama, but also the people and ideas forming AO Industries. John resigned his position with the company to pursue his newly realized but long held vocation: a career in counseling. Currently, John is working with the Catholic Social Services Refugee Relocation Program. Although no longer on the AO payroll, John has a permanent place in the AO family as its spiritual backbone and company consigliore.

Dan and Klay decided to temporarily halt the intake of new clients in order to concentrate on development of the automation system known as AOServ. The AOServ Platform would allow what was once again a two-man company to take better care of existing clients as well as allowing for further growth in the future. AO entered what could be called a developmental cocoon for the next eight months. The AOServ Platform and accompanying web control panels were slowly but surely coming together. Dan was steadily working on the AO Shell, a scriptable command-line interface for account and web site administration. All of this new code desperately required a test environment, sort of a proving ground for the programming concepts, and so Suspendo was born.

The quiet reclusiveness of the summer and autumn was broken only by the tragedy of September 11th, which, incidentally, was also Klay's birthday. Surprisingly, AO Industries seemed strangely insulated against the concurrent downturn in the technology market, and in November, began accepting clients once again.