“Do the right thing, do the thing right.”

I came across the above mantra while reading a book on the rise and fall of Digital Equipment Corporation. It was supposedly hanging on a wall above a coffee machine. The actual phrase was “Do the right thing.” Somewhere, maybe in the same book, it connected with “do the thing right.”

Like most companies trying to distill their identity into a single visionary, yet catchy, phrase, I also struggled with finding something that concisely depicted my personal philosophy and that of Sector7.

I was immediately struck by this phrase. It reflects all the values that I see as being critical for maintaining a long-term business plan.

“Do the right thing” – to me, reflects that Sector7’s primary focus is to build solutions that solve our clients critical business concerns.

With the necessity for building increased performance and flexibility into current IT infrastructure, “Do the right thing” is requisite to a full understanding of not only our customers’ current needs, budget and resources, but also a longer-term view to what will create competitive agility for them in the future.

“Do the thing right” – summed up to me the performance measurement (qualitative and quantitative) of any project. “The road to hell is paved with good intentions” may have been written for the IT department…where, even in good faith, suppliers try to solve clients’ issues and yet are unable to perform to the strategic roadmap, the price, the resources or the schedule – they haven’t “done the thing right.”

Those of you that regularly visit the Sector7 website may have seen something unusual appear – client references. It’s not that we haven’t had them, but that we have never had the time to actually get them written (…Sector7 invented the concept of stealth marketing). The simple reason is that for the past 8 years our strategic OEM partners and direct customers have kept our team ‘110%’ utilized with project work.

For example, while partnering with IBM Corporation, we have performed over 2000 consulting and migration projects. As a matter of fact, Sector7’s Migration Factory has become one of the most recognized business partner names inside IBM. We have had a consistent reputation for responsiveness, fairness and -- success -- which in IBM terminology, is easy to quantify – 100% performance, delivered to end-users on time and on budget.

Rod Adkins, who was the General Manager in charge of IBM RS6000 – pSeries and who recently became the head of all R&D for IBM systems group, very kindly wrote us a reference which I think sums up our 7 years of working for IBM…

“IBM has utilized Sector7's services in hundreds of enterprise customer engagements over the last seven years. The migration factory provided solutions that helped align our customers' businesses for competitive agility and a better return on their investments. The Sector7 team utilizes a proven methodology. Their project management and software engineering skills provide IBM customers with exceptional results delivered on-time and on-budget -- no matter how complex the environment.”

Sector7 has evolved our business plan as our customers morphed theirs…from single application and platform “Migrations” to “Server Consolidation” – both Homogeneous and Heterogeneous…moving from single application replatforming requirements to hundreds, and, in some cases, thousands of applications in the project plan.

Even in this highly scaled environment we “Did the right thing and did the thing right.”

So much so, that on September 30th 2003, IBM Global Services acquired a majority of Sector7 assets. This effectively meant that IBM identified that part of Sector7 which was driving significant revenue for IBM and which IBM saw as key to its future strategy…and ‘bought it.’

The part that remains intact includes our VMS and OpenVMS practice and the Sector7 name (which we agreed not to market again until October 2004…hence the temporary “Doing Business as” Digital Migrations).

So, we’re back to doing what we enjoy – providing all manner of services to the OpenVMS / VMS community – custom programming, remote administration, VAX -> ALPHA -> ITANIUM upgrades, code optimization and of course, OpenVMS to UNIX / LINUX and WINDOWS migrations and co-existence – or as DEC Alumni will remember “ I14Y – Interoperability”.

Do the thing right.

We at Sector7 are huge fans of VMS and OpenVMS. If operating systems could be put in the Smithsonian – VMS should have a place there. Sadly, great technology is not the only driver for the decision to buy or maintain a specific environment…it is the requirement for ensuring IT meets the strategic and competitive needs of the business…on time, and on budget.

“Do the right thing, do the thing right.”

Jon Power
CEO
Sector7