No Kickbacks. No Bias. Just the Right Advice.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve had a lot of great conversations with cloud providers, hardware manufacturers, software vendors, widget fabricators and thingummybob sellers.

Given some of the shared projects we’re currently working on I thought now might be a good time to clarify our working practices. Before we start sharing any content or news that includes input from other companies. Gives me a nice page to just point people to in future too.

I’ve never been a fan of business models where the financial incentives don’t align in favour of the end customer. Financial advisers getting kickbacks from banks and skewing their product recommendations, “free” products selling your data to monetise, or YouTubers “reviewing” products for a nice fee, I’ve never been a fan.

Right from the outset we decided we wouldn’t do that. We make our money by serving our clients. And nothing more.

What this means is that we won’t ever sell someone else’s products or services for a commission. If we recommend something, it’s because we believe it’s the right choice. Nothing more, nothing less and we won’t ever make a penny on it.

If I talk about something in a post, it’s because it was interesting, and the opinions are mine and mine alone. I haven’t been paid to say it.

This means leaving quite a bit of money on the table, but I believe it’s been a large part of why we’ve been successful with efforts such as HPC Club and the ability to even try Supercomputing Strategy Group.

This is easier said than done too. It removes a lot of the incentive for other companies to partner with us and puts more of a burden on us to ensure we’re aware of all (or at least most) of the options available. Most days it genuinely feels like walking a tightrope.

I also have many of you to thank for holding us to account and making sure we remain true to this business model. Please continue to do so.

Not just independent.  Aggressively neutral.