Christmas Eve, 2010: the night OKTOLabs was born

We had been awarded a massive country estate in Ireland for a very high-profile client. By far the biggest project we had ever touched. It had to work. There was no version of this where it did not.

Back then we did it the way everyone did it. Commissioning onsite, trying to get every system talking to each other under pressure, on location, with the clock running out.

It was not working. Engineers on longer and longer hours. Programmers working nights, then weekends, then both. Then subcontract programmers on top of that. Integration that should have been simple would not hold. It kept falling over, and the more it mattered, the less room there was for anything to go wrong.

The deadline was not a date. It was a driveway. We did the final upload as the client came through his electric gates. The demo ran. It all worked.

And I stood there thinking: that is never happening again. I could not quite believe we had got away with it.

There had to be a better way than throwing people and hours at a problem onsite and praying it held. Not for us, and not for a client who trusted us. That was the night OKTOLabs was born.

We took it all offsite. Every system fully built, tested through eight phases and commissioned at our own facility, proven, before it goes anywhere near a site. No more hoping it comes together on the day.

That client is still with us, sixteen years later. The worst onsite stress we ever had is the reason we never came that close again.