Selecting the Right Technology Partner for Success

Over the past decade choosing a technology company with its associated attributes has changed dramatically. With the advent of agile development practices and the benefits of cloud computing such as autoscaling and continuous deployment, smaller niche companies are winning new business contracts at an exponential rate compared to traditional legacy compute environments. These traditional legacy companies need to transform themselves to survive in the marketplace of the future.  

Key factors that require transformation are:

Dated Technology

Many large technology companies have a bias toward solutions in their legacy tech stack over hiring and training new developers on a more modern platform, mainstream languages, and tools.  This decision is driven primarily by not prioritizing the benefit of investment in new technology with hardware and training for employees. Relying on the older technology stacks tend to limit flexibility, speed of development and ultimately time to market for new products and services.

Lack of Flexibility to Adapt to Change

Large tech companies usually have existing solutions that partially fit into a new business venture’s model.  However, since these established companies have many existing clients using the existing solutions, they view changes to those solutions with significant risk, and try and make the new venture use what they have, “out of the can”.

Development Teams Reside in Silos

The large companies generally have dedicated development teams to each application area.  If the staff needed to enhance a system is tied up on another project, nobody else knows the application area, so that causes delays and slow time to market while waiting for resources to become available.

Dealing with Overhead and Runaway Costs

The larger the company, the more you pay for the necessary overhead and bureaucracy required by the company.  This overhead comes in the form of project management office personnel and getting the right resources from the right development teams (and multi-team projects usually suffer delays in coordination and misunderstanding).  

Charter operators when they choose a technology partner need to be aware of the above factors. Having a nimble partner, who understands the problem space, embraces cloud-technology for scale and continuous deployment, who listens to your specific needs and solves problems to support your daily operations are critical for success.

David Hobt – Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer