Introducing “Rittman Mead Consulting”

Back at the start of February I mentioned that I was leaving my consulting job and moving in to the world of independent consultancy; now that the move is complete and I've started the new business up, I can finally start talking about what I've got planned for the future. As you've probably noticed from the new blog home, the name of my new venture is "Rittman Mead Consulting", a joint venture by myself and a long-term friend and colleague, Jon Mead.

You obviously know me, but Jon is someone I've worked with for around four years on a number of Oracle business intelligence & data warehousing projects. Jon and I worked together at SolStonePlus as consulting managers, and around 18 months ago Jon left to join Rocela as Head of Business Intelligence, whilst I stayed on to be their Director of Consulting.

In the end I decided to move on and start up my own consulting business, following on from which Jon and I got talking, and decided to pool our resources and try and build something bigger. The end result is Rittman Mead Consulting, with our objective being to be the No.1 supplier of high-end business intelligence architecture, design, consulting and training resources in the Oracle market.

Jon and I will both be very hands-on, doing the consulting ourselves and working with customers in the UK, Europe and North America. I'd like to think that both of us built good reputations in the past for delivering solid solutions, making use of the latest technology and focusing on delivering results for the customer, and this is something we're going to major on going in to the future. We're also going to work closely with partners, both in terms of our peers who want specialist skills in a particular area, and when we have our own customers who, for example, need remote DBA support to go with a new data warehouse we build for them.

The business approach we're using is to take on consulting projects of between a few days to a few months, both part and full-time, and for one of us to be available at all times. Over time, we plan to grow the business by attracting similarly-minded people to come and work with us; if what we're doing sounds interesting, you're currently working as an Oracle BI&W consultant, you've got a flexible, entrepreneurial streak, get in touch with us. Our model is companies such as Miracle, Pythian, Fog Creek Software and SourceGear, companies that only employ the best people but then go to great lengths to get the best out of them and develop their career; if these names mean something to you, and you're a wizard with OWB, BI EE, Discoverer, OLAP and data warehousing, get in touch with us.

We've also put together a number of training courses, which we'll either run internally for customers, or in combination with partners such as Miracle where we'll jointly market the courses. Our training page lists the current courses, including a five-day "design to deployment" Oracle Warehouse Builder course where we look at data modelling, ETL, project lifecycle management and deployment to production. The aim here is to go beyond the standard OU courses and offer some real-world experience, tackling the business and technical issues that you only come across once you actually use the tools in your own work environment. Jon and I (together with Adrian Ward, which is another piece of news to come) will also be working on the Oracle Press "Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Developer's Guide" book, so overall we'll be balancing the consulting work with training and writing.

For the time being though, our focus is on building up a client list, having Jon and I work with them to exceed their expectations, and to advance the art (or is that science?) of building effective, scalable Oracle BI & data warehousing systems. We've already got our first customers, and we'd be delighted to work for you if you think we could add some value. The blog will still keep running, and Jon will be adding his own contributions as time goes by. Expect a few postings over the next few months on bootstrapping your own consultancy business, figuring out how to market yourself (for which Eric Sink's "The Business of Software" is my guide), and trying to maintain the balance between growing a business and exploring new technology. Until then though, wish me luck and get in touch if you'd like some expert assistance with your Oracle BI&W project.