The Forbin Group

Our value: Finding, training and retaining quality technical people is time consuming, expensive, and risky. We handle this process for you and we back it up with a *guarantee so you can focus on getting your work done. We've built our entire business around a simple value of providing the right resource for the job - guaranteed. Also, we're vendor agnostic. We don't sell software or hardware. We offer only our expertise. We have no corporate overlords to answer to and we intend to keep it that way.

Assurance: All Forbin technical staff have been through a rigorous vetting process. We're consistently told by our people that our technical interview is one of the hardest they've ever experienced. If they pass, they know they're something special. Check out a small sample of one of our technical interviews here:(Interview Sample Links)

Mentoring: When you engage The Forbin Group, you don't just get a person or a group of people. You get an entire organization that is focused on delivering quality technical work. Our consultants are provided a structure for support, mentorship, and growth. Whether it's a midnight call for help in a system-down situation, or a peer review for an architectural design, Forbin's Subject Matter Experts provide support transparently and at no cost to you, our client.

Founded by technologists: The Forbin Group was forged from the 'trenches'. The founders are veteran technologists who collectively have undertaken countless complex technical projects and lead them to success. Our experience with real-world technology work drives everything we do at Forbin. We understand what it takes to deliver in IT and we focus everything on that goal.

Contributing to the community: We are an active part of the technical community. We give back to the community through knowledge sharing events like geekSessions, contributions to Open Source projects, and mentoring and educating our staff to make them even better at what they do.

Ask your current vendors about their qualification process. At the Forbin Group, we will demonstrate that our qualification process by far exceeds that of the competition. In fact, our clients have come to depend and rely on our methods.

Questions to ask your vendor:

Who interviews or screens your people?
How is each person screened?
Do you have summary of the screening?
Is there an established evaluation process?
Is there a guarantee?
Does anyone technical work in your offices?

A9 - We're ensuring that your Amazon searches are lightning fast and always available.
A9, Amazon's product search subsidiary, wanted to increase their operations infrastructure support to 24x7 but only had very senior operations engineers. The Director of Operations met The Forbin Group while he was at Six Apart and was pleased with the services we provided. Now at A9, he first turned to us for a couple of more junior but solidly skilled Systems Administrators. Since all the Forbin partners have done this kind of work themselves we deeply understood the requirement and quickly produced exactly the right folks. We are still on the job at A9 supplying both junior and senior operations technologists. A9 is yet another Forbin client who understands that our careful interpersonal and technical screening provides the right fit with minimum client effort.

Google - We help Google make their
fantastic "Google Apps".
Google, a premier search and SaaS vendor, had important objectives to meet for back-end enhancements to Gmail that they couldn't find the right people in spite of their substantial resources. The product manager who was once the key advocate for Google's internal use of its Apps, knew the Forbin partners from a shared prior employment experience and called on us to provide two very senior Java developers. Google's notoriously arduous interview process was reduced to five minutes when they phone-screened our candidate. That's exactly the kind of result our intense technical screening process is designed to produce. We're still on the job after more than 6 months.

VideoEgg - From White Board to Reality
with a little help from Forbin.
Videoegg, a pioneer online Web 2.0 video company – online video backend for Bebo, Piczo, etc, needed to build a windows server farm to provide encoding for their massive online video presence, which gets distributed world-wide via Akamai caching solution.

In 2006, The Forbin Group architected, and deployed the production and staging infrastructure in their first Videoegg Datacenter in Level 3 facilities as well as their new Development and QA infrastructure in their Headquarters. All environments included deployment of windows and unix/linux infrastructures.

Windows infrastructure included a windows 2003 64-bit server environment with Active Directory for Identity Management, Group Policies, Service Update Services, Deployment Services, and DNS management, and Windows XP 64-bit Environment for encoding farm compute nodes. Other 3rd party solutions used in conjunction with the windows infrastructure are an Anti-Virus solution, hardware-based firewalls, multi-homed network, high-bandwidth low-latency network devices, and high performance Network File Servers. Production environment was designed to support multiple hundreds of compute nodes to be built and deployed in smallest time frame possible to scale the encoding farm almost on-demand. The solution also included utilizing Windows scripting with WMI to provide ease of code deployment with instant roll-back features to ensure highest availability while minimizing down-time during rolling out new encoding code to production systems. The Forbin Group also managed the entire project from beginning to finish.

Linden Lab - Forbin is helping to code
your Second Life.
Linden Lab, the creators of Second Life, a premire online 3D virtual world, contacted Forbin to add additional horsepower to their steller development team to enable them to add new features to Second Life and enhance SL's web integration. Forbin currently has two developers on staff full time at Linden and has been asked to supply an additional 4 consultants over the next few months to work on additional Second Life web integration projects.

Citrix Online - We help keep Citrix Online, online.
Citrix Online is a major SaaS vendor who publishes several very popular applications including GoToMyPC and GoToMeeting. Having web applications that people use every day in business means they can never be down. Citrix Online's technical operations team brought in Forbin to help manage and build their business critical production infrastructure. We're working with Citrix from the top down doing project managment, system automation, and system admistration.