About

Our Mission Statement is very simple, and ultimately interpreted by the client; as it should be.

Facilitate Freedom

This is not meant to be flippant or coy, it’s simply the most concise way to describe our methods and products. Our mission is to help you become more self-sufficient, to have physical control, and in the end, trust your more robust systems and increased up-time – you upgrade on your schedule and discrete components you choose, not based on how much your vendor spent designing a solution. You decide which components to bulk-up on and which you could live with limited access.

Our business model is based on the idea that there are a good number of businesses and institutions who have made compromises that they didn’t choose. Those compromises may have seemed necessary, and in fact a good many probably were.

At the time.

They were compromises based on how well another corporation could use economies of scale to provide a service at a lower rate and higher level of specialization than you could yourself. This means that they needed to pigeon-hole you in with some other company who had your problems…or in many cases, convince you that you had those problems too.

Usually those big companies had big problems and the features built into these applications has become staggering as they try and out-check-mark each other.

“I don’t need all those features”
“I just need it to do this one simple thing well”

All you usually need are a few key features and problem-solvers, but that’s not how these proprietary systems work. In order to offer you that low cost, and gain the economies of scale, they need to work within a very controlled and proprietary system so there is little or no need for interop. Throw in, they’ve often spent millions on these systems and want to get the most out of it (naturally) and to lock you in – to turn you into some kind of long-term revenue source.

We start with “How can we free this customer, first from their current constraints, and then from ourselves?”

Again – there was a time when all of that out-sourced storage and distribution may have been necessary, but in 2010 we are more enlightened and the standards have matured and we have more CHOICES in browser, infrastructure, operating systems (but not so much desktop hardware), databases (my goodness all the databases!) – we know what is possible and through our own daily experience, we know how it could be used to great effect in our own businesses – but there is a lot of baggage with that proposition when you farm it out.

There was a time when you were looking at big capital outlays to “get into the game” – if you were going to promise your clients that their data was safe, that you had control of their information and documents, you were going to have to demonstrate some infrastructure and expertise above-consumer-level IT. Until recently there wasn’t much of a continuum in options but we think the time has come. Now you can right-size these systems, allow them to grow, move with media/standards, not spend anything near what you spend now and simply have a better system.

AGILE development practices mean you don’t have to design the ENTIRE program before you start moving and seeing incremental returns for your efforts. Said plainly, software development is REALLY EASY in 2010! Our philosophy is, there is almost no need to send all that money to a corporation that only exists to pull money from you in the most efficient way possible for as long as possible.