Twenty-six years, three companies, one habit.

By the late nineties companies were paying more for IT every year and could not say what the next year would cost. Infrastructure was configured by hand, by consultants, by the hour, so the bill grew with the complexity rather than with the value.

We built an automated hosting platform, and then sold something nobody was selling yet: infrastructure and operations at a fixed rate per employee per month. Per-seat pricing, roughly a decade before the industry settled on it. The platform existed to make the pricing possible, not the other way round.

Mondo acquired it in 2007 and I stayed on as their chief technology officer.

Mobile data roaming was priced so badly that most companies simply switched it off when their people travelled. They had bought a capability and then instructed staff not to use it, which is the clearest signal a market can give that its pricing is wrong.

We assembled a global roaming service across several operators, so a company could work at local rates anywhere in the world, and sold it to enterprises and airlines. Twelve people, and €4M of revenue in the year it was sold. Gigsky acquired it in 2014 and I ran their EMEA operations afterwards.

Consulting for large enterprises, I kept meeting the same thing. It took three to five years to get from an idea that would help a customer or an employee to something actually running in production. By the time it arrived the idea was outdated, and the person who had it had usually left the company.

That is not a delivery backlog. It is an operating model with a cycle longer than the shelf life of its own ideas. Fixing it needed cloud as the foundation and a different way of working on top, which we built, and then ran, for large enterprises. Days or weeks instead of years.

TDC took a 40% stake two years in. I was chief executive from the start; about a year before the sale I handed that over and became chief technology officer, in order to build the Lithuanian organisation myself: fifty people across Vilnius and Kaunas doing 24×7 operations, cloud service development and SaaS innovation.

Devoteam acquired the company in 2021, at around a hundred people across four offices in two countries. I stayed as CTO of Devoteam M Cloud Denmark until mid-2022.