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The story goes that a youngster was walking on a beach amidst a mass of starfish who had been washed up. As he walked, he was tossing them back into the sea until he was stopped by an older man who said, "why bother, there are 1000s, you won't make any difference". The youngster picked another one up, threw it in the sea and said, "I made a difference to that one", and carried on his way.
This post is to introduce our business, Starfish Virtual Labs. We’re named after the Starfish Principle, which is an amazing story that sums up our approach; we don't claim that we can fix all the world’s problem, but we do want to make a real and positive impact on the organisations that we work with. To do this, there are also some other principles that we value. At Starfish we…
put our people first, because when we do, they put our customers first.
are vendor and service provider agnostic, because this allows us to provide our customers with their best outcome.
we have growth targets that are based on capabilities, not revenues.
we are on a mission to develop and share our expertise for the good of our community.
Starfish is a professional services business focused on Networking, and we provide the full lifecycle from architecture consultancy through, design, implementation, and support. We work across all domains such as enterprise, data centre, WAN, and service provider, as well as with all key industry vendors such as Cisco, F5, Fortinet, Juniper, Aruba, VMware, and Palo Alto. We also run our own labs which we use for testing and developing of skills.
Although, we registered as a UK business just over four years, it’s less than three years since we made our first hire. Since then, the team has grown to nine, ten when we complete our latest hire. 80% of our team are from an engineering background, the kind of engineers that you can turn to at 2 AM when you’re offline and you need all your 1s and 0s to line up.
With this small but growing team, we have delivered large, complex, and critical projects across Financial Services, Retail, Transport, Higher Education, Service Provider, and Local Government. We are always looking for new and interesting challenges. However, we will never hard sell – we’re here to provide help only if it’s needed. So, feel free to get in touch, even if it’s just to build our community.
Before closing, I wanted to add a personal note. This post has been four years in the making and anyone that knows my history will also know that four years coincides with the sad demise of Hutchinson Networks. I wanted to acknowledge the experience, knowledge, and the network of people that my time at HN gave me because Starfish is also a regeneration story, embracing the things that went well and learning from the things that went wrong. I hope all my former colleagues are in a good place and as excited about the future as I am.