We have many years of contracting experience and of all the clients we have worked for it struck us that not one had a firm grasp on their configuration management. Not one had a career Configuration Manager with experience; the role was filled by the first available person. Every site we worked on had attempted to define their own procedures and write their own dedicated scripts in an effort to control the beast. Not one had installed any software to do this for them. But what struck us even more is the fact that not one had even looked for any software. Is all this a sign that the configuration management field is still in its infancy and it is common knowledge that to do it right you have to do it yourself?

Maybe.

Yet it is our experience that there is not enough expertise in the field to enable companies to do this well by themselves.

Given that every organisation with an IT department has to address this issue, why is there such a lack of expertise? Is it because it is not a "glamour" field like Java development, or business analysis?.

We recognised the lack of leadership from the large companies in terms of decent software to manage change. So we set about starting a company that will help others by providing a clear direction in the configuration management field. Our aim is to become the market leader in the field and give our knowledge to the world through our software and services. We plan to "glamourise" the field and gain the attention to it that it deserves.

Where are we going?

Our first product is out of beta testing and is now available. Called Tableaux, it aims to automate the tasks of build and release management, allowing you to concentrate on what to manage and not on how to manage it.

We built Tableaux as a result of our frustration at the lack of tools in the configuration management area. Every client we contracted for was inevitably going about it the wrong way, so we wrote our own tool to help our clients out.

The high end software companies have developed products like Tableaux internally but will never release them to the public because of the competitive advantage it may give to their smaller competitors.

Our direction ahead is based on the Tableaux platform, with many new and exciting features and plug-ins in the pipeline.