Tellago && Tellago Studios 2010

With 2011 around the corner we, at Tellago and Tellago Studios, we have been spending a lot of times evaluating our successes and failures (yes those too ;)) of 2010 and delineating some of our goals and strategies for 2011. When I look at 2010 here are some of the things that quickly jump off the page:

• Growing Tellago by 300%
• Launching a brand new company: Tellago Studios
• Expanding our customer base
• Establishing our business intelligence practice http://tellago.com/what-we-say/events/business-intelligence-with-sql-server-2008-r2-tampa-fl/
• Present at 9 major industry conferences: ex: Teched US http://www.msteched.com/2010/NorthAmerica/BIE403
• Publish a number of MSDN articles as well as in other industry magazines: ex: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=6c1da607-4785-4668-a274-6898c38ea603&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=Feed:+MicrosoftDownloadCenter+(Microsoft+Download+Center)
• New MVP nominees : ex: Dwight Goins http://dgoins.wordpress.com/
• Launching and maintaining Tellago DevLabs: http://tellago.codeplex.com/
• Publishing a WCF 4.0 book: http://www.amazon.com/Professional-WCF-Communication-Foundation-Programmer/dp/0470563141
• Sponsoring and presenting four sessions at the Buenos Aires Code Camp: http://weblogs.asp.net/gsusx/archive/2010/09/03/tellago-is-rocking-buenos-aires-code-camp.aspx

When I look at our achievements, I am particularly proud of the fact that we didn’t have a single Tellago employee resign or being laid off this year :)

Talent, passion and teamwork

“No one can whistle a symphony. It takes an orchestra to play it.” At Tellago, we succeed or fail as a team. There are no individual talents bigger than our goals as a company. During 2010, we’ve achieve that by bringing together a set of very talented programmers that are passionate about technologies and, at the same time, are great team players. We firmly believe on hiring some of the best programmers in the Microsoft world, building great teams and wait for wonderful things to happen :). More importantly, we have worked really hard to make sure every developer at Tellago sees this company as the opportunity to work with some of the brightest engineers in the industry, break some rules, try to do things differently and work on things that matter.

Our own Chris Love summarized why he loves working at Tellago: http://professionalaspnet.com/archive/2010/07/15/Why-I-Love-Working-for-Tellago.aspx

Don’t be average: Build stuff that matters

I’ve always been a firm believer on building things that matter and trying to make a difference. Tellago Studios has been a long time dream as a vehicle for building enterprise software that follows some of the modern techniques pioneered in Silicon Valley and that, frankly, defies the stigma that enterprise software mostly sucks! Our first product: SO-Aware it’s a solid testimony to those principles. In a matter of five months, we have a significant number of companies in production or active development as well as more than 270 companies currently evaluating the software. If you were happy with SO-Aware you should wait for our second and third product which are launching in February.

We’ve explained some of these concepts in our interviews at Microsoft’s Endpoint TV last summer: http://channel9.msdn.com/Shows/Endpoint/endpointtv-Meet-SO-Aware-Part-1

In addition to Tellago Studios, we have shown our commitment to open source but launching and maintaining Tellago DevLabs. In the next few months, we will be open sourcing some of the cool technology packages we have been using in our current projects.

What’s up for 2011

Without given a complete roadmap about our plans for 2011, I can tell you that we are looking as this upcoming year as a time to expand our services and software portfolio into technologies that has an impact in the current world. In that sense, we expect to increase our work into new technology areas with a lot of emphasis on open source technologies that complement and extend the current Microsoft stack. Additionally, this year we are going to obsess about agile processes as much as we do about technology. More to come soon….

BTW, did I tell you we are hiring? :)

Happy 2011!