Launching Luxant Solutions

Open for Business

Many companies have a need around expertise with distributed systems, and choosing the right technologies and best patterns, identifying bottlenecks and vulnerabilities, and learning how to scale and best integrate with their business processes. Unlike 25 years ago when high speed messaging was primarily leveraged by trading floors, cloud computing has become ubiquitous and the market is headed very quickly to the edge, and nearly every business today is forced to deal with similar problems, except often at a much larger scale. I created Luxant Solutions to help companies solve those problems.

The Dream

Years ago I was flying to New York City as a TIBCO employee to consult with a fintech trading/clearing corporation and struck up a conversation with an independent marketing consultant. He spoke of taking a month off in the summer to vacation and taking December off to ski. I couldn’t believe it! That planted the seed… Someday I wanted the freedom to choose engagements, take time off, or lean in when excited about a new technology.

The Journey

Over the next 25 years, my career wandered through consulting, engineering, software architecture, principal engineer roles, and ultimately into product management to reach an executive level. Product was fun - I loved the creative side, and due to the nature of a startup which involves wearing many hats was still able to help NATS users and Synadia customers with their architecture and design. That was one of the things I most enjoyed and often looked forward to.

I’ve been truly lucky in my career to work on cutting edge communication technologies. I’ve helped build six distributed communications technologies: PLATINUM’s PEC, Talarian’s SmartSockets, TIBCO’s RV, EMS, FTL, and PGM and most recently NATS.io at Apcera and Synadia - most if not all of these are still in use today! I’ve helped integrate many systems over the years with these technologies.

I’d always wanted to hang out a shingle of my own, have more control over my work/life balance, and be able to spend more time with my family while still experiencing the reward of leaving a customer successful and delighted.

Today

It’s interesting. As noted earlier, many companies and enterprises are struggling with distributed communications and computing, and encountering similar problems to what we were solving 20 years ago, just at scale. In fact, in some ways things are easier (Kubernetes deployments), yet at the same time much more complicated (debugging the deep tech stack of Kubernetes). We have massive deployments extending to the edge and devices. We’re no longer dealing as much around shaving off microseconds (although that’s still fun and has its place) as we are handling resiliency at a truly massive scale. We can do so much more with the technologies we have today and are always pushing the boundaries from making edge deployments in stores and oil rigs, and making connected cars autonomous via built-in store, and going forward all the way to forming arbitrary mesh networks in space with satellites. Exciting times!

At Synadia we used to joke that being good at distributed system design wasn’t necessarily rocket science, but rather just having a lot of scars. If you need some expertise in building out your system, microservices, or distributed applications, reach out and hopefully avoid some scars of your own.

No matter the scale of the deployment, what I care most about is leaving a customer with efficient business processes backed by a smoothly running and predictable distributed system. Let me know if Luxant can help.