Have you ever noticed that companies with truly fantastic customer service—you know, the kind that when you call, a real human picks up a phone to answer your call in person, and then immediately solves your problem—almost never have more than a handful of employees?
Or, think about software companies: isn't it sort of odd that most huge software companies can't even manage to use email, whereas the smaller companies often not only answer your email, but get you a beta version of a fix for your problem within a couple of days?
We believe the ability to provide great service is one of the advantages of being a small business.
Our company started out helping small business, it is itself a small business, and we love small business. That's why creating solutions for small business the focus of our custom development and consulting services.
If Ford were to call us and say, "We need a new billing system for our 13,000 dealerships worldwide," we wouldn't be the right company to do that. That's because enormous, clunky companies often really do need enormous, clunky solutions that can not only do a particular job, but also interface with legacy MS-DOS based systems, run on obsolete hardware, and even incorporate features to protect the company from whatever subset of its own huge employee base is (inevitably) incompetent or untrustworthy.
On the other hand, suppose a Montessori preschool with five employees were to call us and say, "We need a new billing system that works like the paper system we have now, and lets our busy staff do an excellent job handling billing issues without distracting us from the important stuff or forcing us to hire another person."
Well, we can do that. In fact, we love to do that kind of stuff. Creating software that lets small businesses leverage their advantages in being small, instead of forcing them to do things the way a larger company might need to, is what we're all about.
So, if you have a particular aspect of your business that could benefit from a software solution that is tailored to your needs, we may be able to help.
Areas of expertise
The following list of our core skill areas may help you figure out if Nakahara Informatics might be able to help with your business:
- Mac OS X software development: In most cases, the Mac is the best platform for small business these days, and we'll probably recommend it to you if you need some custom software written.
- Other UNIX/Linux software development: This is sometimes necessary, and we know how to do it.
- Web-based application development: With the advent of technologies like AJAX and Ruby on Rails, web-based apps no longer have to be clunky or expensive to build. For customer-facing applications, web-based solutions can make a lot of sense.
- Software development assistance: If your business creates software, we can temporarily increase your capacity by taking on some areas of the development for you.
- IT strategy consulting: If your business is stuck with a bunch of PCs that have all sorts of security and usability problems, we can help. If you need help figuring out which new technologies can help your business, and which you should ignore—Skype? VOIP? Web 2.0? Blogging? Windows Vista? Mac OS X? OpenDocument?—we can help.
- Windows and data lock-in elimination: Microsoft, Intuit, and many other large software companies enjoy a lot of leverage once you use their products, because they use proprietary formats and data lock-in to make it hard for your business to stop using them. That's because once you have your business data in Microsoft Word or Quickbooks format, it's not easy to get it out. Nakahara Informatics can help you rescue your data and get out of this kind of situation. We can also help your business get rid of Windows entirely, which more and more small business are doing.
Contact us for more information
If the summary on this page indicates that Nakahara Informatics might be a good fit for your project, then please contact us via email with a description of your needs and what we might be able to do for you. (If you prefer, you can also call us, at +1 (888) 550-0505, extension 1.)
We'll determine whether we think we can help with your particular project, and even if not, we may be able to recommend another company that can.