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Atlanta, GA—October 5, 2021—HatchWorks, one of North America’s leading providers of software services, today unveils Cinch—a tool initially built to solve an internal pain point, now ready to help other growing services companies.
With Cinch, teams can build project estimates in minutes, always know their team members’ availability, and predict if projects will go over budget before they do. Cinch is a one-stop tool that gets teams out of spreadsheets, and in control of their business.
“As HatchWorks began to scale, it became increasingly difficult to know who was working on what, when they were rolling off projects, and who was best suited to work on our upcoming projects. This problem was affecting how we served our customers and our bottom line. The market had several expensive, bloated ERP systems and small-time tracking players, but nothing specifically suited to solve the problem we were experiencing. So we decided to do what we do best – thoughtfully design a product focused on solving a specific pain point to deliver a positive outcome,” said Brandon Powell, CEO of HatchWorks.
For companies where people’s time is the main cost and revenue driver, the ability to properly manage a bench of team members can be the difference between being profitable or being out of business. In fact, roughly 90% of a professional services company’s cost is their people.
“Cinch has simplified our work of tracking project cost and profitability, especially around team allocation and planning across projects. We used to do this the hard way, using spreadsheets,”
said Diego Rodriguez, General Manager of Fair Play Labs—a participant in the Cinch beta.
“We want to help other companies fix the same pain point we were having at HatchWorks. We value user feedback above all else. That’s why we’re launching Cinch as an open, free beta. We want to learn from our users and refine Cinch to make it even better,” said Matt Paige, Sr. Director of Strategy & Business Development at HatchWorks, and General Manager of Cinch.
To sign up for the free Cinch beta, visit https://cinch.works/.
Atlanta, Ga. – For the second year in a row, HatchWorks has been recognized by the Atlanta Business Chronicle as one of The Best Places to Work. This annual ranking, in partnership with global workplace culture assessment leader Quantum Workplace, highlights successful companies across the metro area that go above and beyond to keep their workforces happy.
Established in 2016 in Atlanta, HatchWorks is a multi-award-winning enterprise software development and cloud adoption company specializing in futureproof, innovative software products powered by data analytics, AI and IoT innovation.
Since its inception, HatchWorks has focused on maintaining a culture that supports and motivates employees to do their very best work every day. This includes:
If there is one constant in the world—especially in the digital age—it’s that software development departments live in a never-ending struggle of demand vs. resources.
As data continues to be the gold standard of business success, software and its resulting analytics and business intelligence applications all collide. More so, the desire to also meet and exceed the expectations of end users, all while continually evolving this new data-driven environment, means that talent is stretched on the best of days. So why is that? Is it due to a lack of qualified people? A lack of specific expertise? Or is it a matter of companies struggling to offer its talent pool meaningful projects? The answer to all these questions is yes.
First, let’s look at the perceived lack of qualified people. For many organizations, especially in the pre-COVID era, the idea that talent must be located within one’s own backyard is luckily a fading memory. The idea that anyone can rely entirely on backyard resources in 2021 is downright impossible. The talent and expertise required for modern digital initiatives literally takes a world of people to address. It’s for these reasons alone that remote workers—and the talent that remote work makes available—are indispensable.
Moreover, the opportunity for organizations to partner with companies offering comprehensive nearshore talent often makes for the best of all worlds. Timezone matching aside, cultural and linguistic alignments make for greater talent, less expensive investments, and better results.
Then, of course, there is the expertise issue. Having a robust stable of internal talent is always a good thing. However, the complexity of modern enterprise software is often too much to keep up with. Again, I go back to the data and business intelligence aspect of modernity. Regardless of infrastructure—from cloud storage, to data center technology, IoT, to customer engagement systems and more—every one of these requires specialization. From AI and machine learning, to data and analytics—all of these necessitate expertise that often become too big of a requirement to be able to consistently staff internally.
Again, this is where partnering with external experts can save the day. They can provide the talent when and where required—without the burden of quadrupling internal hiring on a yearly basis—to keep pace with modern requirements.
Lastly, at least for this article, there is the reality that good talent is hard to keep. The fact of the matter remains that we live in a talent-rich economy—one that rightfully caters to those who have expertise. This means that in 2021, employers no longer call the proverbial shots—rather, talent decides which companies are worthy of their presence and dedication.
Enterprise environments—ones that by nature must move slowly and carefully, so as not to disrupt legacy systems and architectures—often find themselves in a precarious position. The talent they have and must retain are those embedded in the legacy aspects of the organization. As such, those employees’ expertise are highly valuable and required, but simultaneously they too cannot be all things to all people. These employees often lack the skill-sets required for highly modernized projects.
This leads to a secondary issue: those same slow-moving enterprise environments do not necessarily attract experts looking for leading-edge work. People in the software development space often dream of the “new,” while shying away for the legacy application world. With enterprise departments firmly rooted in the “slow and steady,” attracting and maintaining new talent is often difficult.
Not to sound like a broken record, but again, the outsourced talent scenario is the best of all worlds. Enterprise environments can maintain their current workforce, ensuring they are happy and working on what they know best, while simultaneously working with top talent in other fields of expertise to move the company forward.
Software development teams can’t be all things to all people, nor can they possibly meet every demand. They can, however, be augmented with external team members to achieve new goals and new heights, all while reducing the stress of trying to be superheroes every minute of every day.
HatchWorks has been selected among the Top Georgia Software Development Companies by Designrush.
Whether you look at it from the perspective of cloud technologies, digital initiatives, software applications or IT architecture, there is one constant in business: the ever-growing need for analytics. But there is far more to the picture than that.
Sure, analytics are fantastic. But I can assure you that, as an executive, I’ve seen my fair share of analytics and reports. And rarely do they accomplish anything—because they are devoid of context, meaning, or even reality.
Meanwhile, the demand-driven vicious cycle for such analytics seems to permeate the world of business. It usually starts with a senior executive craving data—but they have no idea how to get it, nor do they understand the complexities that come with real data. They still love that adage of “if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.” But in this case, they can’t even access it!
And perhaps that’s the biggest issue of all—the complexity, paired with the idea that actionable data is somehow easy. After all, it’s just a dashboard, right? The issue is this: with so many disparate systems residing in modern IT infrastructure, IT teams continually struggle to consolidate and manage data to make it actionable and insightful to key business stakeholders. Ultimately, the data must be transformed into a cohesive and more intuitive model to enhance business intelligence.
The question then becomes, can this process be made easy?
Well, yes and no. Let’s start with the “no” first. Making data truly actionable in the true meaning of business intelligence is not for the faint of heart. In fact, it’s actually REALLY hard. It involves everything from connecting the aforementioned disparate systems, to embracing artificial intelligence and machine learning—and, of course, making it all work together. This is something that I leave to people who truly know this space.
And this is where we get to the better news surrounding the “yes” portion of the question. Making business intelligence a reality is not up to individual departments like sales, marketing, operations, and so on. Nor is it up to IT. Regardless of how smart every one of those people are in every one of those departments, they too have day jobs. And being an AI and machine learning expert ain’t one of them.
Instead, this again falls into the world of Enterprise Software Services—people who live and breathe this world every day, who understand the nuances and machinery that drive true BI. By engaging with the experts—that is, the true data and analytics professionals using the latest data science technology—you can then start to define mission-critical metrics, prototype data visualizations, and develop comprehensive dashboards. Ultimately, this introduces a whole new world of business intelligence to your organization.
The right expert team will specialize in building future-proof, innovative software products powered by AI, machine learning, and real-time user-driven business intelligence. As a result, you’ll be empowered to create meaningful, actionable data to improve, inform and automate your critical business decisions.
This results in access to in-depth, real-time data analytics about customers, products, processes and so much more—in turn leading to smart, proactive, highly informed decision-making, which is critical to gaining that competitive advantage.
Now, if only you knew a company that did all of this and more! 😉
In today’s fast-paced business world, buzz words like digital transformation, cloud, big data, analytics and more have permeated the social fabric. However, those words not only have meaning—they have real-world consequences that are plaguing organizations globally.
You see, for every buzzword and industry-related jargon-of-the-day there lies just under the surface a world of very real and very pressing technologies—ones that most IT departments struggle with daily. Whether it be implementing micro-services, containerization, or cloud enablement initiatives—these technologies are now the basis for the modern landscape of business success. But with legacy architectures standing in the way of mission-critical integrations and interoperability, it’s clear that these out-of-date silos fail to meet the modern standard.
For IT departments that are left struggling to integrate and operationalize—battling these aforementioned outdated, legacy architectures—they must first come to the harsh realization that technical debt cannot be an excuse. Yes, we have all heard the arguments. It’s too much money wrapped up in current systems, too difficult to climb out of the financial hole, and too difficult and expensive to move to new systems when the current ones aren’t that old. Honestly, I’ve seen people rationalize getting rid of family heirlooms faster than they do aging technical infrastructure.
All jokes aside, being shackled by this aging technology is a recipe for disaster. For every day that goes by, a competitor is throwing aside the “old” and moving rapidly forward with the “new.” This means better and more advanced products, translating to faster time-to-market, all resulting in far greater market acquisition. Better yet, these same companies are providing a customer experience that will be even more difficult to battle as a competitor. In short, with amazing customer experiences come life-long customers.
So how do companies get out of the vicious cycle of debt and excuses? The fastest, best and most accurate way: engage with the experts. And before you think this is a shameless plug for my own company, I assure you it’s not. It’s actually the reality of the world that we all now live in.
Enterprises are not known for being overly nimble—and that’s okay. But again, that too is not an excuse. Knowing that an entire business sector now exists, built on the premise to accelerate innovation, is where every struggling company needs to start.This means engaging with experts that can quickly identify the root of organizations’ technical debt problems by evaluating current architectures and hybrid infrastructure requirements, and planning and executing the adoption of modern technologies and goals—all while alleviating financial constraints.
Better yet, these same professionals can also help reallocate budgets for improved outcomes in other divisions within the organization. In fact, throughout my years of doing this professionally, it’s amazing to see how much budget suddenly appears from the depths of despair when you launch new technologies to fix old challenges; and when you calculate financials based on new metrics such as time lost or wasted high-budget talent plagued with menial tasks (instead of doing what they were paid to do).
There is a whole new way of doing business. There is a whole new way of solving business challenges. Luckily, there are companies like ours that represent the way forward to success.
And as a challenge to readers, would you like to re-calculate your technical debt? Reach out—we’ll solve it for you.
Athens, Ga. – HatchWorks Technologies has recently been named one of the fastest-growing top 100 businesses owned or operated by a University of Georgia alumnus. The company ranked 14th in the annual list of honorees released by the UGA Alumni Association’s 2021 Bulldog 100. This is HatchWorks’ first year to qualify for the Bulldog 100, which received more than 400 applications for 2021.
Founded and led by UGA graduate Brandon Powell, HatchWorks was established in 2016. Since then, the Atlanta-based award-winning software product development and support services company has seen exponential growth compounded year over year.
From 2017-2019, HatchWorks grew revenues of $2.5 million to over $8 million, added team members from 12 to more than 50, and expanded to two satellite offices in Chicago and San Jose, Costa Rica. (Given the impact of COVID-19 on businesses in general, this year’s Bulldog 100 list took into account only pre-pandemic financial information.)
“For me, this awards program signals the power of UGA’s entrepreneurial spirit and successful investment into empowering business professionals to be resilient and overcome difficult times,” said Brandon Powell, CEO of HatchWorks. “I’m very proud to be recognized by my alma mater among this incredible group of peers.”A graduate of the UGA undergraduate degree program in Management Information Systems, Brandon is also an alumnus of the Harvard Business School Program for Leadership Development. Prior to founding HatchWorks, he spent almost two decades in management consulting, as well as in executive leadership at AT&T and head of product for Cricket Wireless. Today, Brandon retains a link to his alma mater with Hatch Futures: a philanthropic program providing summer internship opportunities to underprivileged youth and future UGA graduates. Through this six-week program, HatchWorks gives interns professional work environments and hands-on training for technology skills; as well as longer-term mentorship opportunities and career development assistance. To view the alphabetical list of businesses and to learn more about the Bulldog 100, see www.alumni.uga.edu/b100.
