What We Do

Is Take Care Of The Muck.

Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon.com, defined the problem perfectly while taking about the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2, a web service that provides resizable compute capacity) and Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3, storage for the Internet designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers):

Everybody who ever started a successful company wants to ... go directly from [an] idea to a successful product. The reality is that there are a lot of obstacles between your idea and a successful product...

Your major bottleneck in developing your ideas and your successful products and service offerings turns out to be something that's actually not unique to your business at all. It's completely undifferentiated. This is certainly true at Amazon.com, and it's certainly been true from the very beginning from one person to twelve thousand people: that at least seventy percent of your time, energy and dollars, go into this back-end heavy-lifting infrastructure. I call this heavy-lifting, muck.

The thing about this muck is, you have to do it, unfortunately, at the highest quality level. Because if you don't do all of these things that have nothing to do with your business at superb quality levels, your idea will never succeed...

So you have your idea, and between you and your idea is a bunch of undifferentiated heavy lifting. And you have to cycle through that loop, and the winners are the ones who can cycle through that loop faster than others [can]. So you end up being slowed down.

(Thanks to Frank Sommers for the perfectly clipped quote. You can hear the original speech directly from MIT.)

HJK Solutions takes care of the muck for you. We know how to get it right the first time, and how to point out the areas that will need to be "circled back" to as you grow.

How we do it.

First, we get a feel for what your goals are and how your product will work; we can't help you out of the muck until everyone knows what needs to be done. Then, we cover all the bases by starting at the bottom of the infrastructure and working our way up.

Work on the Corporate Infrastructure, making sure you have all the basic services you need to be successful. (Things like Email, Source Control, Identity Management, File Sharing, Bug Tracking and Collaboration tools.)
Design your Production Infrastructure. This covers things like selecting an Operating System, creating a Build System, implementing Configuration Management and automating your application Deployment.
Provide Support and Intelligence. This means making Monitoring and Trending essential parts of the system. We'll work with you to identify what the key metrics are for your application, and build systems that alert you in a timely manner when it has issues.
Hire, train, and augment your own Operations Staff. We've met a lot of excellent people over the years, and we love to hook them up with awesome companies.

Don't repeat yourself.

Software developers have long known the value of not repeating themselves. HJK owns a large repository of solutions to the most common infrastructure problems. That makes our turn-around time much shorter than if you had to do it yourself.

The bottom line.

We work with you to augment your knowledge about how to build your infrastructure. We get a feel for what you need, how you want to work, and what your application will do. Then we fill in the gaps, either with off-the-shelf technology, custom software, or our own catalog of solutions. Once you are launched, we help maintain your infrastructure and eventually train your Operations staff.