The thorny path of a young company

Introduction

We are all used to the fact that every day a fairly large number of startups are born. Nowadays, on the one hand, it has become fashionable, and on the other, an ordinary person has a real opportunity to do something of his own and make money from it.

In my opinion, most startups are created on the Internet or for mobile platforms. These are various websites, and web services, and applications for social networks, and applications for numerous gadgets.

If we look at the functions that these startups perform, most of them are small application applications that have a good user interface and several unique functions. The main problems that startups have to solve are either attracting the target audience to their resource, or optimizing the project for the burden.

In my opinion, the emergence of such startups and their enormous popularity is associated with a huge "not plowed" field of applied tasks that can be automated or computerized. Such startups and projects are needed and very useful for our society.

"Other" projects

But I want to talk about other projects, which have recently appeared less and less. I'm talking about research or high-intellectual projects. Where there is a lot of unknown and little studied, where to achieve the goal, research and a certain scientific nature are needed, if I may say so. Indeed, almost no one is now engaged in the study or creation of operating systems, the development of file systems, security systems or databases. No, do not get me wrong, such projects, of course, exist, but their total number is minimal, if we consider the situation as a whole.

I always wanted to do something special in my life, something complicated, where I would have to conduct research, use mathematics and optimization, and most importantly, a lot depended on the correctness and stability of the written code.

So in 2006, the idea came to write a security system for the Microsoft Windows operating system, which would be faster, more functional, more stable, technically more advanced than all existing solutions. Of course, the task was very ambitious and difficult, so we decided to start small, namely with the development of a personal firewall. Next came the proactive defense module, then by combining them we got a Security Suite that can provide decent protection against all modern types of threats.

It took us about 4 years to implement the current version of Online Solutions Security Suite (OSSS) . Tremendous work has been done, a lot of research has been done and thousands of lines of code have been written.

Problems to solve

Search for qualified people

Yes, I could never have thought that among programmers there are very few who can actually perform complex tasks, be able to optimize code, work well with data structures and generally write a lot of useful, high-quality and understandable code.

Usually, everything is limited to basic knowledge and clever words about design patterns (patterns). It was also surprising that people very rarely turn to official documentation or standards, and often resort to searching for ready-made solutions on google. That is, programming comes down to trying to get the desired result by pulling other people's solutions from all sides and combining them into one. There are units of those who understand how the computer works inside, what and how the compiler does, how to write a multi-threaded application correctly, and through which objects and how to synchronize them correctly. That is, almost everyone indicated such words in the resume, but the banal task of synchronization introduced people into a stupor, and the written code often shocked me. People were similarly surprised by questions on combinatorics or on the complexity of algorithms.

Search for adequate people

Finding a qualified specialist is difficult, but finding a qualified and adequate person is very difficult.

There were times when a person performed a test task well, but when communicating he turned out to be a rather strange person. Of course, all people are different, but when you assemble a team to develop a complex project, the common values ​​and outlook on life for the whole team should be similar.

Search for motivated people

If you find a qualified specialist - difficult, adequate and qualified - very difficult, then purposeful, adequate and qualified is almost impossible.

All books on project management and training tell a lot about the role of a leader, but as our experience shows, in addition to the leader, you need to gather purposeful and interested people. No leader can lead people for a long time if they themselves are not interested in the result and in achieving their goals.

As I already said, it is extremely difficult to find such people, but we succeeded and now the backbone of the team has very serious knowledge and experience, and the desire to achieve world recognition pushes everyone to solve problems even faster and better.

Requirements development

It is enough to simply develop a product when the analyst has already worked, when all the requirements are formalized and well formalized. It is enough for the developer to write the code, and the tester to check it. Everything changes when the requirements for the product are written by the developer himself, and he does not know what exactly the user needs, what and how it works in the depth of NDIS or how the “communication” on LPC is arranged.

Development of the new and the unknown

When developing for a closed platform, when a lot has to be reversed, when there is no confidence in the possibility of obtaining the necessary data at the right time, when there is no confidence in the theoretical possibility of implementing the plan, it is very difficult to work, and developing adequate, understandable and timely requirements is almost impossible.

Motivation

Despite the best team, interesting and difficult tasks - to work for a long time without visible results is very, very difficult. So, it took us more than a year to study the internal structure of the network subsystem, file subsystem, and other low-level things. The first public version of the main product had to wait about 3 years. Working in such conditions is extremely difficult.

Gained knowledge and experience

Everything is possible in this life

And you can find money, and a team to collect. The main thing is to believe in what you are doing and doing, rather than thinking about it!

Complex things can create very small teams

Our example has confirmed that very small teams of motivated people are able to come up with and implement world-class technical solutions. You do not need 100 engineers and 20 managers to develop a complex low-level application that controls all critical operations that occur in the kernel of the operating system.

Ordinary people, not mega stars, create products

Our experience has shown that many professionals and experts are more accustomed to giving advice or teaching, but when it comes to the real business and responsibility for the result, these mega stars usually go aside, coming up with all kinds of pretexts. In reality, ordinary people who are motivated to work and simply responsible for the result achieve the result.

There is nothing simple in life

Nothing is done just like that. It is impossible to achieve a significant result without spending effort, without sitting at night to release the release, without arguing in the smoking room and without thinking in your soul about the work of your team or your code. Nothing happens for free, and the developer pays his time with his family or girlfriend, sleepless nights and spoiled coffee biscuits for the opportunity to realize a world-class product.

let me introduce myself

I could tell a lot about how our company and our products were created, about the mistakes that were made, and about each of our achievements, but first I want to present our company and the flagship product to the habra community.

So, our company is called Online Solutions Ltd. It was founded in 2006 in the city of St. Petersburg. The main activity of the company is the development of new software products to protect end users from all modern types of threats (viruses, trojans, rootkits, etc.). Information about the company: http://www.online-solutions.ru

The main product of the company is a proactive defense system with a powerful firewall - Online Solutions Security Suite .

At the moment, the program is intended for an advanced user who has an idea of ​​the processes of the operating system and the principles of the network.

For an understanding person, system configuration will take no more than 1-2 hours in the course of normal work. After proper configuration, proactive protection provides almost 100% protection against all known types of threats, and a powerful firewall allows you to fine-tune the network policy, practically without slowing down data transfer.

The program belongs to the class of programs that prevent malicious programs from penetrating the computer, and not to the class of antiviruses aimed at treating an already infected machine, therefore, to ensure security, preventive methods are used to detect and counter malicious code.

The main advantages of our program at the moment are:
• superior technical solutions,
• lack of “crutches” aimed at passing tests,
• high speed,
• minimal consumption of system resources,
• rich set of rules for organizing protection,
• strict and clear techie interface .

We invite everyone to take part in testing our products. Beta testers are actively wanted, and in general it is very interesting to hear the opinion of the community regarding new companies and their products in the information security market.

We are waiting for your comments.

PS We know that world news on the site has not been updated for more than a year :)
See company news, not world news (they are located on the left) :)

PPS In the near future (2-3 weeks), expect a huge update of the OSSS functionality . Support for NAT, DHCP, RAW-sockets, search and removal of modern viruses and rootkits using the integrated anti-virus module OSAM and much more.