It’s always a little difficult to decide on how the first post should be created. Do we immediately go into what we do as a company? Do we state our vision, mission and all that corporate talk? Do we jump into what our industry is currently facing, at this moment, I am looking at the theft of secured information in NASA. How on earth does someone in NASA loses his laptop and not have whole disk encryption?
I think there will be plenty of time for that later.
Instead this first post simply states the philosophy of PKF Avant Edge. Not as an IT consulting company. Not as a professional service group. Not as a project management company. But simply, as an entity.
I have had more than 10 years of experience in the corporate world before I decided to set up the company. 10 years in 3 companies: Siemens, DHL Asia-Pacific Information Services and BlueCoat Systems. 2 German companies. 1 American. Along the way, I’ve met with people who had shaped me somewhat into what I am, people who had imparted their own brand of management, philosophies, methods, giving me waysigns to follow, and showing me characteristics I should avoid.
When PKF AvantEdge started, it had a simple goal. Make positive history. It doesn’t matter how. I wasn’t interested to be recycled into the myriads of System Integration businesses out there. We’ve dealt with principals, resellers all our lives, and we were following a well beaten path. This time, we needed to create our own history. Become a company that people want to be a part of. Create a culture of creativity. Create an environment of constant change. Find the patterns of tomorrow and pursue it today.
The last part proves the toughest. Wayne Gretzky, commonly known as the greatest ice-hockey player in history, says, “I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.” Through 2 and half years, that quote epitomizes our company. We envisioned a technology landscape that is so integrated to the major portions of the business that regulatory compliance is unavoidable. We saw the advent of hacktivist groups like Anonymous when we started, and pitched for companies to strengthen their technical resolves. We see a movement to information plundering using social networks and medias, trawling literally across the vast ocean of data to steal identity and information assets.
The future of our business landscape will be defined by corporate earthquakes like Knight Capital, which saw a $440 million trading loss caused by a software glitch, and their shares free-falling 80% in two days. Or Adobe losing 150,000 user accounts based on SQL injection. Or take-your-pick ERP implementation disasters that run into the millions with no results at the end.
While I’m not saying that we are market leaders in tech consulting currently (by any stretch of imagination), I believe this is where the puck is going. Regulatory controls, more stringent requirements, certified and accredited qualifications of practitioners. It will look more like the banking landscape in a few years time.
Now, we can move on and discuss about how those geniuses at NASA can fail to encrypt their laptops….
