About Us
“They are harsh questioners.”
- Megan Alink, Alcatel-Lucent
Founded in 2008 productOps is an agile software development consultancy that builds impactful technology based on a firm grasp of our client's tactical and strategic business needs. We understand, fight for, and deliver for your business as if it’s our own. We have been building AWS cloud solutions since our inception and today other areas of specialty include IoT, Machine Learning , Big Data, Edge, and Rapid Prototyping.
Located in Santa Cruz, California we have an in-house team of 50 engineers, designers, solution architects, and product managers. Our business has been built on relationships and trust through timely delivery of value, working with innovative organizations from local startups to globally-distributed Fortune 50 companies including Nokia, New England Journal of Medicine, AT&T, Ithaka, California Community Colleges, and Conde Nast.
01 discovery
“They are harsh questioners.”
- Megan Alink, Alcatel-Lucent
Discovery is possibly the most critical aspect of the project life cycle. Clearly defining requirements and translating them into a path to victory is a team effort. We ask a lot of questions, even if we think we already know the answers. We go all in which means we often make decisions on your behalf. It's important our team has sufficient understanding of "the why" behind every decision. As your partner we're not here to tell you what will make a project bigger and more complex. We're here to help you discover what will make you more flexible, efficient, and more profitable.
02 Design
“We're completely design aware; it permeates everything we do.”
- Steve Yatson, Head of Design productOps
Our design team works closely with clients throughout every project. We work with you to create proper visual guides in the form of journey maps, wireframes, and architectural diagrams to drive the project forward and keep everyone working towards the common goal.
03 Development
“productOps is absolutely committed to mutual success.”
- Dale Myers, CTO Ithaka
Development isn't just about code. Creating what is needed with consideration for all the people involved is a big part of the productOps way. What we build must last and be maintainable. Otherwise, it fails to provide you or your customers real value. Regular and honest communication is what allows us to develop strong relationships. If there's bad news, let's talk about it early. If there's good news, let's talk about it often. And let's make sure the team we collaborate with is prepared to maintain and improve what we have built, in order to provide value to your customers for years to come.
04 Victory
“I know you will create what is needed, not just what I asked for.”
- Rock Pfotenhauer, California Community Colleges
Our clients range from Fortune 500 companies to non-profits serving thousands of universities worldwide, to Silicon Valley startups. We treat each as if they're our only client. To us, victory only happens when you're satisfied that you not only got more than you asked for, but you got what you truly needed.
The Team
11 years - 101 Thrilled Clients
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co-founder CEO Bob Cagle
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Bob thinks better near a whiteboard, is a wizard with Excel, and believes there is an entrepreneur in everyone. He also believes it's better to ship nine out of ten features on time than ten out of ten a day late.
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co-founder CTO Dean Pfutzenreuter
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For over two decades, Dean has delivered software products large and small for desktop computers, internet infrastructure, mobile devices, and the web. He is known for his unflappability, his iron determination to ship the product, and his easygoing nature
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VP Marketing & Strategy Frank Humphries
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Frank joined productOps in 2008 with over 20 years of enterprise management experience at companies ranging from HP to a boutique financial services management firm. His patience, persistent approach, and thoughtful analysis prove extremely valuable in helping clients with strategy.
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VP Product Delivery Paul Iverson
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For over two decades, Paul has brought his intellect and determination to bear on complex software projects large and small. Working as a change agent inside Bell Labs, AT&T, and Alcatel-Lucent, he helped push these organizations to embrace leaner, more efficient development processes. Paul holds an M.S. in Computer Science and a Ph.D. in Mathematics.
OUR SERVICES
We build custom apps and technology to meet the needs of you and your customers
01 Strategy
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Ongoing change requires clarity on the definition of success. Getting there requires a strategy that considers business objectives, team talent, and market expectations. Our discovery engagements invest energy and time necessary to paint the target and build the plan. Learn More
02 Technology
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Sustainable businesses must have a delivery platform that serves their customers with a roadmap of applications. Market expectations of design and software features are not only about suitability for purpose but held to standards of technology market leaders.
03 Transformation
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Change is hard. Although we have deep experience in the skills and talents necessary to build for the future, we make our biggest impact through relationships. Organizations will always have hurdles and roadblocks that must be dealt with, but considering and developing the people in the system always has the highest benefit.
OUR WORK
Transforming organizations through strategy, technology and custom software solutions
Big Data In Aerospace
THE CHALLENGE
ABC, Inc. is a Fortune 50 company who came to us needing an enterprise-wide, real-time data platform. A system that could both secure and support access to highly controlled commercial and military data. They had hundreds of data sources with hundreds of thousands of tables and data types and a need to ingest up to a petabyte of data a day.
THE SOLUTION
We delivered a data platform that is an easily maintainable, scalable, and highly secure data management and governance system built on proven non-proprietary industry standard tools the company was already familiar with.
AWS and productOps Case Study
THE CHALLENGE
The company had required months of lead time to obtain access to data or to undertake any kind of reporting or Business Intelligence analysis. With an enterprise-wide, real-time platform that could be accessed efficiently and securely this would be cut significantly. In addition, in this highly regulated industry, the security and classification of data was an important consideration in moving to a new platform. It was essential the end-to-end solution would be General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) compliant.
productOps and AWS Bring Needs-Based Change
Data governance and data discovery were key challenges as the platform would touch all aspects of the business. The company needed actionable and accessible data in real-time so staff could pull the information they needed in a uniform way to support data science, business intelligence and aerospace application performance.
DATA & DESIGN In Education
Matching Community Needs
California allocates over $2B annually to community college programs. The task of allocating these funds and tracking program success in an effort to maximize workforce enhancement is a daunting one. California Community Colleges(CCC) is the largest system of higher education in the nation with 2.1M students attending 115 colleges. In 2016 productOps began a partnership with the CCC Chancellor’s Office to build a statewide system that would allow easy program proposal, review, and real-time metrics.
End-to-end Program Management
The productOps NOVA software platform is designed to increase student success rates through more efficient and relevant program creation, better fund management, and enhanced data management across the entire CCC system.
RAPID PROTOTYPING In IoT
The Big Idea
Prototype and test a connected wetsuit that meets the requirements to solve the following problems while still offering the user experience, performance and durability currently provided by the world’s leading brand.
The Small Solution
To meet the challenge we partnered with one of the world’s leading wetsuit providers and adapted existing components and IoT solutions to our needs. We soaked sensors, wires, and materials in the ocean for months. We explored solar, motion and battery power. And we surfed, a lot.
Enabling Mobility In Smart Cities
The Challenge
Cities are changing at a rapid pace and quickly adopting smart eco-friendly spaces and transportation. Our client wanted develop a new city scooter that greatly improved ride quality and safety as well as a management platform that would support consumer features along side robust fleet management and the capability for 3rd parties to white-label the scooters and the platform.
The Solution
Our client and their Mobility partners know the state of their vehicles at all times. We turned to AWS to provide the backbone of our platform and used AWS services such as API Gateway to securely manage requests, ECS to process messages, and a Parquet database on S3 to store all message transactions in a large data lake. Using AWS, our certified engineers we able to quickly develop, test, and deploy our platform ahead of schedule.
SELECT partners
We partner with top technology providers to deliver real value
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Unleash the power of deep learning computer vision - alwaysAI provides developers a simple and easy-to-use platform for building and deploying deep learning computer vision applications on embedded devices. alwaysAI provides pre-trained models, a development virtual machine and simple APIs to help you quickly enable core CV services like object detection, classification, tracking, counting and facial recognition.
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We're proud to be an AWS Advanced Consulting Partner - We've done some truly amazing things on the AWS platform. From data engineering and visualization to machine learning and AI. We've been at it since the inception of AWS and our people hold a combined 40 plus certifications and counting and have years of experience in building world class solutions for a diverse set of clients.
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Build Transformative Applications - We use VANTIQ's Event-Driven Architecture to quickly build applications that use advanced technologies such as machine learning, object recognition, IoT, and edge computing to track and respond to everything moving in and around your business in real time. With VANTIQ we can provide better value faster. And that's what productOps is all about.
CONTACT US
CAREERS
If you don't see a position listed here that interests you, feel free to contact us or send your resume directly to careers@productops.com. We are always interested in speaking with quality candidates in development, design and product management.