Courage

"You'll never get fired by using company ______ !!!"

Principals

This business requires introspection, adoption, and evolution.  It takes a regular bit of courageous planned executions (and insanity) to be here. 

Timing is important; you have to have a willingness to methodically plan, execute, and sometimes break things to get to the next milestone. This causes hiccups at times, and can be pretty scary when the potential outcome is systems downtime.

But the alternative is worse: Not taking the planned risks keeps products stale and lifeless, reduces upgrade frequency, and increases opportunity for compromise. A bit of courage goes a long way toward eliminating potential issues.

Policies

"You'll never get fired by using company X" possibly holds true, but let's be honest: that really only gives you the ability to pass the buck. That's just not our style.

In business practice, we stay away from companies that peddle FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt). FUD finds it more important to sell an image than to compete with real products. FUD capitalizes off the fear of the consumer, which is going to be short lived regardless of the immediate sale.  Using a nameplate as a safety net to command a market place of consumers that feel like they have no other choice is a common tactic for FUD.

Simply put, we don't use ignorance against our clients to make quick sales. That’s why you’re reading this; we’d rather educate our clients in all aspects of who we are and what we do, putting ourselves out there transparently, bucking the status quo.

For every marketing dollar FUD spends expressing why FUD is important, or how your infrastructure will collapse without them, there is another company with another marketing dollar instead being spent on R&D and producing good products that are less costly, more secure, and more performant. Granted, those companies are harder to find, but when you do, do your best to keep them around. These are some of our best vendors and clients, and the type of company we strive to be.

We don't FUD, we educate.   We support companies that have competing products, open standards (OSS and OCP), as well as detailed informational processes that allow us to be more transparent, honest, and competitive for our clients.

Given enough time, all things inevitably do fail, so we prevent failure where we can by proactively decommissioning resources and monitoring for potential issues before they become client problems. In our opinion, it makes better sense to anticipate failure and prepare accordingly, than to be afraid of these events and attach ourselves to costly big box names out of fear.

We believe that courage gives us more of a mental process to try to fully understand each part of the operations we employ.  We battle-test our products to confirm stability, instead of assuming just because vendor Y provided it, it will work as the label says.

We respect time tested technologies, and trust in expertise and wisdom over sales gimmicks that don't offer measured results.  Too good to be true usually is.  Barring FUD companies, in a practical sense we trust in companies and vendors that haven't led us astray.  We stay loyal to vendors because 25+ years of technology wisdom has taught us that they aren't exactly all created equally, and good ones (specifically in Information Technology) are more difficult to come by than you'd think.