“A lot of ‘cloud’ providers are so busy providing commodity CPU cores that they seem to have forgotten about the software that runs on them. You can lose most or all of the ground you've gained with an otherwise well-architected system by not giving careful attention and due diligence to this fact.”

—Brad Peabody, CEO and Founder, Uncloud

Call it fate, or the Law of Averages, as a kid, I (Brad) ended up with a Commodore 64 for a toy. And as it turns out, the only thing you can do with a C64 is write programs in BASIC. It came with a manual too, and I distinctly recall asking questions like “Hey mom, what does ‘duration’ mean? It says I'm supposed to enter the ‘duration’ as the first parameter”.

One day, my uncle came to visit from out of town. And he, by chance, knew how to write BASIC. I told him about the things I had been fiddling with on the C64 and mentioned I had been trying to write a Tic Tac Toe game, but couldn't quite figure it out. I asked him if he knew how to do this? Although, I don't recall his answer, but I do recall talking to him the next day and him showing me this fully working Tic Tac Toe game. You have to realize this is in the 80s, video games were relatively primitive and rare, and the fact that someone could sit down and in a day write a working video game on this console that I had in my bedroom… I was amazed. And, so it seems, completely hooked.

Now all this, of course, didn't make me very popular in school, but it taught me a very interesting lesson of much more significance, which stuck with me from a young age: While getting something to function correctly was of course the goal, how you went about it made all the difference. It taught me to value quality, approach, and attention to detail. And, it taught me that I had so, so much to learn.

Fast-forward a couple-or-three decades and while the technology has evolved in innumerable ways, so many of the core lessons remain the same. The attention to detail, the value of a high-quality result, the idea that a functional system or product and how you arrive there are both important.

Managing the tradeoffs between innovation and risk is one of the most difficult challenges a company faces today. Surprisingly enough, Moore's Law has aged better than many people thought. And regardless of the exact numbers, innovation in processing power, memory, and storage continue to move forward at breakneck speed.

From a business perspective, though, balancing the cost, reliability, and benefits of these new technologies can be daunting. The proverbial corporate scrap heaps are littered with projects which invested too early in new technology and were burned by unexpected problems. And likewise, right alongside them, are the remnants of once-great systems that were written off as no longer viable because they stood still while competitors took advantage of newer innovations.

At Uncloud, we know these decisions are difficult to make, and we know they are important to your business. And we're on your side. It's also why we specialize in custom cloud systems because how a solution works for your business is important to us. Most cloud solution providers will, after just a brief review, try to put your business into one or more boxes – prepackaged solutions that they provide. At Uncloud, we compare your needs to the technology available and mold a solution that works well for your situation, your business.

This distinction, while it may seem subtle, makes all the difference. And it's both all about technology – knowing what's available, what works, the costs, the risks, is absolutely critical. And at the same time, it is also completely separate from technology – working with people who want to understand your business and help you arrive at a solution that works well for you – that's not something you can buy or even put a price on. And it's the difference Uncloud brings to the table.

Uncloud's leadership boasts nearly half a century of combined experience in software, hardware and computing systems in general.