Bugs Byte

Bugs Byte, a partnership of senior IT engineers in the Chicago area, takes on infrastructure and integration work that goes beyond routine support. The partnership works on site near Chicago and remotely for clients elsewhere, during weekday hours on Central Time, and by its own account it has delivered IT solutions to small and medium businesses for more than two decades.

Infrastructure and integration for failing or stalled systems

The firm's engineers design and modernize infrastructure, building in redundancy for services that have to stay available. Cross-platform integration ties disparate systems into one working whole, including environments built on virtualization from VMware, Microsoft, Citrix or Nutanix. The firm's focus is on services that are failing, projects that have stalled and new builds, which it says is where it adds the most value.

Security past the firewall

Firewalls and antivirus software are not enough on their own in a cloud-centric environment, and the firm's security work looks beyond perimeter tools to protect the systems that matter. Its networking and virtualization work reaches software-defined networks, virtual desktops, application hosting, storage and data centers, and the firm notes that modern virtualization now reaches client devices, networking equipment and whole data centers, not only servers.

What the partnership will not do

The firm sets its limits plainly. A help desk is not something it runs, monitoring platforms are not replaced by it, and day-to-day support is not taken over, nor are machines patched or help desk monitoring offered. It states that its designs are meant to make a client's helpdesk and monitoring work easier, with fewer alarms, fewer tickets and systems that document themselves.

Engineering depth for providers and internal teams

The firm's clients include managed service providers that need added engineering capacity, with some work carried out under the provider's name, in-house IT teams that lack project capacity, and small businesses that want to replace scattered systems. The partnership says its unusual model draws on engineers who have spent years on large enterprise projects, and it hands over designs and documentation so that in-house staff can run what has been built. The firm describes its business model as spreading engineers' unbilled time across clients, which it says lowers costs for small and medium businesses.