Complementing technological growth and social welfare with perfection: Datastream Connexion

Entrepreneurs create companies to establish a supply for a demand. Companies inevitably compete for a greater share of their markets by investing their revenues back into themselves to increase their productivity. While this seemingly is the right way to expand, often times, it so happens that organizations suffer lean periods and at times like these, the increased manpower starts to seem like a liability rather than an asset. However, there are some companies that do not focus on ruthless expansion and instead worry about quality, rather than quantity. Corporations that are able to pull this off are almost always the ones engaged in genuinely helping other businesses and communities derive greater value and reduce inequity.

Datastream Connexion is one such company that channels its resources into its team and products, and takes a holistic approach towards its product development, instead of pursuing rapid growth. In addition to improving the quality of its products and services, Datastream Connexion is mindful of the effects of its applications on its users and strives to improve the overall user experience.

In conversation with the Founder of Datastream Connexion, Eric Hoffman

Q. What were the challenges that you initially faced?

In the beginning, there were significant challenges, especially concerning ‘migration’ of applications and data from traditional systems to the cloud. Helping companies realize the need for migrating to cloud systems and taking them out of their comfort zone of the traditional data center was one of the biggest challenges that we faced. But as time passed, we were able to convince our customers to move to a cloud platform like AWS by assisting them with application migration, data security, and compliance.

Migrating to the cloud offers cost advantages and operational agility, but it also brings to the table security, compliance and data privacy solutions for business. That is why we prefer AWS, as Amazon is a large organization with ever-evolving platform initiatives, and can ensure security and compliance with its substantial resources. Also, at our company, we employ third-party auditors to check if the services we offer are compliant. We spend a lot of internal time discussing the engineering and management challenges to help organizations cooperatively work toward securing data.

Q. Can you elaborate on your company’s offerings?

Developing SaaS or mobile applications is only the tip of the iceberg of what we do. Besides this, we manage the AWS cloud workload on behalf of all the applications that we build for our clients. Thinking about the migration path, we help shift our client’s systems from ‘monolithic applications’ to cloud architecture, for example leveraging micro-services rather than single, large virtualized servers. We complete this migration while ensuring security and data privacy. The tremendous stakeholder support that we receive for our solutions and services is due to the trust and partnership established during the migration journey.

We treat each customer as unique and try to understand their unique goals. We follow an empirical, repeatable approach to migrate database and applications over time to extract the highest value. Once we have established the trust with our clients through initial implementations, we discuss further options related to the resiliency and the different services enabled by cloud adoption. Critical to cloud adoption or application modernization is to ensure clients are comfortable and engaged, so they are empowered to inform and show progress and project success to their superiors.

Q. Do you believe that striving for ethics and success in business can the tough?

If you measure success by economics, it can create a dynamic that is difficult. We have found that by focusing on our core ethics of treating the relationships with our users and customers with dignity and privacy, that project and product success follows. From there, economics hopefully follow.

Q. Trust is a difficult attribute to measure and a delicate dynamic to maintain. How do you maintain this with your employees?

Within our team, we focus on transparency and a collaboration track record of decision making that supports our core mission. Our developers, for example, are given autonomy to think of new ways to accomplish tasks and bring them to the team, which usually results in an update to our development guidance processes. I trust our developers to know the best way to code, just as they trust me to ensure our systems are secure and compliant. Trust in each other is key to open communication. Our ability to organically improve and accelerate viable solutions is due to the open culture of sharing and trust.

Q. What do you feel are the reasons behind your company’s reputation?

Our company has done counter-intuitive actions at times; placing the best interest of the project or stakeholder ahead of our own. If we commit to an action, a deliverable, or a shared success, we are your partner in accomplishing it.

Q. People like it when companies are involved in social welfare/CSR activities, what do you say about this?

Being blessed to be in business for nearly 20 years, you realize you also want to give back to the community who trusted and sustained you. As a company, our Community Cares program allows us to donate time, software, and our employee’s skill sets to local and national non-profits. Our employees enjoy these opportunities to make an impact.

Q. Where do you see your company a couple of years from now?

More balanced in the types of customers we engage with. We continue to expand into diverse areas that in total help create software for good. Resiliency means diversity in this business; all the way from product to human capital.

Meet the driving force behind Datastream Connexion’s holistic growth

Founder, Eric Hoffman has been involved in the innovation side of IT for more than 20 years.Not enamored with the traditional IT playbook, he has been at the forefront of innovations in the Legal, Health, Food, and Ag, and Sports Media fields. He is on the Board of Directors for multiple non-profits and is on the Forbes Technology Council.

“Datastream Connexion offers consulting and development services that will quickly and efficiently bring your product to market.”