Quick Links
Most people in the flexible workspace world have heard of Alliance Virtual Offices—and of their founder, Frank Cottle.
What fewer people know is just how long they’ve been pushing the virtual-office world forward, especially when it comes to wholesaling. Their roots go all the way back to 2006.
📜 A quick detour: the history of virtual offices
If you’ve never explored the timeline of Virtual Offices, it’s absolutely worth a look.
It’s wild to see operators like Fegen Lawsuites, Barrister Executive Suites, Intelligent Offices, and Regus leading the category over the four decades between 1960 and 2000.
Then came 2006–2007, when the first VO wholesalers—what we’d now call aggregators—launched. That included Davinci and Alliance Virtual Offices. A few years later, in 2010, Opus entered the market with a different strategy: partnering with mail centers instead of workspace providers.
In short: Alliance Virtual Offices (originally “ABCN Virtual,” and now known casually as “Alliance”) has been selling virtual offices to businesses since 2007.
🔨 Building a model for the future
A decade later, in a 2017 podcast episode, Frank shared that he’d evolved the Alliance model significantly.
Inspired by the dot-com boom, the rise of technology, and analogies from the travel industry, he began steering Alliance toward becoming a global, tech-powered network of virtual office services.
Their mission became clear: Use technology to deliver professional addresses, mail handling, meeting space, and business support—without the overhead of a traditional office.
🧑🔧 Enter Syncaroo
Since 2024, Alliance has been working with Syncaroo to power their next major leap: moving wholesale virtual office markets toward real-time workspace and meeting room bookings.
That infrastructure, built on top of Syncaroo’s proprietary data-syncing technology and a trio of inventory-system connectors, forms the backbone for Alliance’s new mobile and web booking experiences.
Both apps are designed to provide a faster, more accurate, on-demand booking system for wholesale VO customers, while keeping overheads (aka busy work like emails or manually setting up bookings) to a minimum for their partner centers.
📈 Early Results
And since the rollout of their new platforms this year, the results have been remarkable.
More than 20% of all Alliance meeting-room bookings are already flowing through real-time booking infrastructure. Even though just 10% of their centers have real-time integrations activated so far.
(FYI: You can watch Syncaroo co-founder Hector Kolonas, Alliance leaders Juan Hilario and Alex Garza, and The Shop Workspace’s Anne Olsen talk through the integration so far.)
⚙️ And what's next...
Alliance has signed a new multi-year, multi-platform data-infrastructure agreement with Syncaroo, further expanding real-time bookings & workflow automation support for more and more of partner centers and platforms.
“This is just the beginning. We’re building a future where every Alliance partner can run a smarter, more efficient, and more profitable workspace powered by technology that truly understands their needs.”
Learn more about our extended partnership with Alliance on their official blog post here.
We look forward to supporting their mission, and partner centers. through their 20th anniversary in 2027, and beyond.
