After over 15 years of working for large technology companies, I decided to follow my dreams. The first iteration of Hamrick Consulting began in 1995 when I left Zebec Data Systems in Houston, Texas to help small to medium sized businesses develop proposals on a contract basis.
A year later, I started to recognize that while the computer industry was thriving, small companies had a very difficult time getting any attention. I then decided to concentrate on helping my customers implement computer and networking technology.
My years of experience
and training working for large companies, as well as the explosive PC
market allowed me to scale down my previous “large system” mentality
and concentrate on designing PC computer networks for smaller companies.
I soon realized that implementing technology was a lot about computers, but more about service. It was then that I started to realize that the drudgery of the PC was in itself an industry. New software was designed to require new hardware new viruses were designed to require anti-virus software and a trillion dollar security industry. An endless cycle of obsolescence that had held the consumer hostage for years.
So, I went back to my roots...a VT100 (text terminal for you young guys) connected to a VAX 11/780 (mini-computer) seemed to be a much better way to manage a data processing environment. So in 1998 I pitched this thing called server based computing to one of my small town clients. We used these little boxes called thin clients to distribute a windows desktop to 23 people. The industry fought me the entire time. I won.
Today, that small company now has 40 users and some of the same thin client devices that were installed 13 years ago. In the meantime, I turned more and more small business on to this concept and formed Profile Technolgoies, Inc, to bring server based (utilility computing) to a much wider geography.
As of 2011 my concept has grown to over 600 thin client devices at 20 different companies in this tiny little area of the country that didn't know what email was 10 years ago.
Because I didn't have the funds to grow the company alone, (investors were being brainwashed by the pc pundits) and because my partners in the business did not share my goal of growing the business first regionally and then nationally, I sold them the company and went on a road trip.
I'm a huge proponant of the cloud and computing as a utility and have been searching for the right time and the right place to make some of this happen somewhere. After 28 years in the technology industry perhaps my passion for the computer-less computer environment will take roots.