Ain't No Mountain High Enough...

A Startup minus the screw-ups

It was almost the night before Christmas. On the 23rd of December we were asked by high-end event company Everest Conference GmbH to plan and install an IT infrastructure in their Berlin offices by the end of January. A start-up.

Everyone in IT knows what that means and... hello? Over the Christmas and New Year's holiday in Europe? No wonder we got the job. "Any other client would probably have allocated lots more time for this, given what they needed done and the sophistication of their vision," says CODE COUTURE CxO André Jay Meissner. "But we were stoked with the Christmas spirit, so in only three consultations, we were able to map out a battle plan and agree to a budget."

That meant while the Everest folks were off on their skiing holidays, we were busy ordering hardware and leaning on the telecoms to reserve some capacity for Everest. "It's easier getting a date with one of Santa Klaus' snow bunnies on Christmas Eve than it is confirming a DSL connection from Deutsche Telekom over the holidays," says Meissner.

We met the timetable because all services and systems for Everest were preconfigured at the CODE COUTURE media lab, and then transported to the client and installed in one fell swoop (it was a long weekend, actually).

By February One, the whole shop was rocking, but only after the staff of 15 was captivated for three hours by our no-nonsense, cut-to-the-chase, training session. Since that day in 2006 we've been on-call for Everest, maintaining and tweaking the system on site, and from remote.