Tag Archive for: Konsulko OnDemand Time Engagement

Konsulko Group: The Year in Review 2022

2022 went by quickly with Konsulko engineers working closely with our customers, our partners and the open source community. For the tenth straight year, Konsulko Group has helped our clients build outstanding commercial products with Embedded Linux, Yocto Project and OpenEmbedded, as well as deploying Over-the-Air (OTA) software updating.

Engaging with our customers

We had particular success with our Konsulko Continuous Time Engagement™ offering, providing dedicated engineering resources for two of the world’s largest semiconductor companies. This model provides guaranteed engineering time for an agreed period. KCTE has allowed our customers to use our engineers on a variety of their requirements, and switch between these tasks as the rest of their project and in-house engineering required.

Of course, many of our clients prefer Konsulko OnDemand Time Engagement™, SOW-based engineering for high level consulting, on-demand support, and specific tasks within a larger project. KOTE is also best for longer term engagements without a hard deadline that can be stopped and started as necessary, and projects with an expected pause (such as bring-up of new hardware which almost always results in a re-spin of the PCB).

Partnerships and Conferences

We continue our strong relationship with the Linux Foundation and Automotive Grade Linux. We worked with mender.io and PHYTEC, providing support and development for their customers. With our friends at ICS, we presented at a joint webinar in August, Software Update Mechanisms: Selecting the Best Solution by Konsulko’s Leon Anavi and ICS’ Jeff Tranter.

Our Konsulko engineers were active participants (often in person, sometimes virtually) in conferences and developer gatherings. Leon Anavi, Vitaly and Maria Wool, and Tim Orling made presentations at the Embedded Linux Conferences (North America and Europe), FOSDEM and Yocto Project Summits:

Tim also posted a technical paper on Using kernel config fragments to remove an unwanted feature.

Two top engineers join the Konsulko team

The bar is pretty high for joining Konsulko Group. Some of our team have thirty years experience with embedded software and Linux. Most have over twenty and all have over fifteen years, working (and playing) with Linux and the open source community. So we were happy to welcome Denys Dmytriyenko and António Oliveira to Konsulko Group this year.

Denys is a long time Open Source Software developer, contributing code to many FOSS projects, like glibc, PostgreSQL, KDE, MythTV, LIRC, OpenEmbedded, and Yocto Project. Before joining Konsulko Group, he worked as Software Developer and Architect for Texas Instruments for almost 20 years on numerous Embedded Linux (MIPS and ARM-based) products. Since 2011 Denys has served on the OpenEmbedded Board of Directors, and since 2019, on the Yocto Project Technical Steering Committee. He is a long time contributor and maintainer of numerous recipes and layers in the OpenEmbedded/Yocto Project universe.

António has worked in development of highly optimized hardware and software ranging from deeply embedded microcontrollers to full-fledged graphical user interfaces. During this time, he has gained extensive experience in build automation tools, analog and digital circuits, powerline communications, and low power and low frequency radio communications. An active member of the open source community, he has contributed to Yocto Project and the Linux kernel. In addition to his work as an embedded engineer, António served eight years on the executive board of his local parish in Portugal, including four years on the municipal council.

We hope you will have the opportunity to work with Denys, António and the rest of Konsulko Group in 2023.

Konsulko Group: The Year in Review 2021

Thanks to our customers, our partners and our dedicated team of engineers, 2021 was a very successful year for Konsulko Group. 

We’ve been chosen to work on important projects in consumer electronics, automotive, medical devices, agriculture, mining, finance, and autonomous vehicles. Our engineers helped our clients, new and old, build outstanding commercial products with Embedded Linux, Yocto Project and OpenEmbedded, as well as deploying Over-the-Air (OTA) software updating.

Partnerships

“Konsulko is a recommended and trusted partner for helping Mender customers and prospects succeed in the Embedded Linux space. They have an excellent team of professionals who will deliver on time and as agreed.”

Thomas Ryd, CEO, mender.io

We continued our strong relationships with mender.io, and with the Linux Foundation and Automotive Grade Linux (AGL). 

We also launched a new partnership with PHYTEC at the Embedded Linux Conference (ELC) in Seattle. Konsulko is providing support and development for PHYTEC customers using their Systems on Modules (SOMs) and Yocto Project Linux distribution.

Conferences

As in previous years, Konsulko engineers were active participants (often virtually) in conferences and developer gatherings, making presentations at ELC and Yocto Project Summits, and writing technical papers on Yocto Project, security, and OTA. We hope for a time in the not-too-distant future when it makes sense for developers from all over the world to gather again face-to-face to share ideas. 

Contributions

As many of our engineers have been working (and playing) with Open Source Software (OSS) for over 20 years, Konsulko Group is proud of our continuing commitment to contribute to the community. Last month we were happy to hear that Konsulko is #3 in contributions to Yocto Project “Non Core,” just behind industry giants ARM and Fujitsu, and ahead of every other software or hardware company.

This was even before we welcomed OSS veteran Tim Orling to the team in December. Tim was recently Core OS Architect and Yocto Project Architect for Intel Corporation, and serves as a maintainer of meta-python and many recipes in openembedded-core. He has authored hundreds of applied patches for openembedded-core and meta-openembedded. 

Doing business with Konsulko Group

As a team we have found that the best way to work with our customers and prospective customers is to provide a high level of transparency about our business processes. This year, we’ve published blogs on scoping the effort required to successfully complete a customer project, and another describing our two models of engagement

  • Konsulko Continuous Time Engagement™ for dedicated engineering resources
  • Konsulko OnDemand Time Engagement™ for high level consulting, on-demand support, and specific tasks within a larger project.

We hope you have found these useful, and we look forward to working with you in 2022.

Choosing the best model to engage with Konsulko Group

As a consulting and services company, Konsulko Group is committed to acting as our customer’s trusted advisor. That extends across our entire business – from the technologies and services we recommend, to our time tracking and billing practices. We’re committed to running our business with the utmost integrity and transparency, following the best industry practices. 

Over the past couple of years, we have written about Konsulko’s Globally Employable Engineers™ based throughout the world and working together remotely (something we have done successfully long before the pandemic). Members of our team have years of software engineering experience, excellent English language skills, and are comfortable working directly with our customers. 

Konsulko engineers could get good jobs anywhere, but they choose to live in their home country, or elsewhere in North America or Europe. Demand for their skills is strong and tapping their talent does not come at an offshore salary cost, so understanding Konsulko’s engagement models can be crucial to matching resources to the job at hand.

Konsulko Continuous Time Engagement™ 

Under this model, sometimes referred to as “dedicated engineering” or “staff augmentation” in the industry, Konsulko provides dedicated and thus guaranteed engineering time for an agreed period. We will allocate the resource(s) to you, whether it is on a full time basis or some other number of hours per week, and those resources will be dedicated to you. 

As such, we will start invoicing for our time as soon as the resources are allocated to you and there is a signed Master Service Agreement (MSA), Statement of Work (SOW) and purchase order (PO) in place. We will not accrue billable time if any of these resources are out for personal reasons, holidays or vacation.

We will, however, accrue all other time, even if we’re blocked from making progress for reasons outside of our control, such as, hardware problems, VPN or other IT issues, access to your internal infrastructure when necessary, or lack of adequate documentation. This guarantees that our engineering resource stays dedicated to your project, so as soon as we get “unblocked” the work can immediately resume.

The Continuous Time Engagement model works well for larger projects with multiple requirements and deliverables,  projects where the requirements are fluid and you need maximum flexibility, or any project where the schedule calls for dedicated resources for the duration of the work. Customers who are willing to get directly involved in managing the hand-offs and task alignment between their own engineering team and Konsulko engineers often find this an efficient way to work with us.

Konsulko OnDemand Time Engagement™

Under this model of engagement, you will be invoiced only for actual time we spend on the project. If we estimate a job will take six engineer weeks and it only takes five, you pay for five weeks not six. Startup time setting up your hardware or working with your IT department to enable access to your infrastructure is considered part of the project and thus billable hours. 

If we get blocked from making progress for reasons such as those mentioned above, we stop accruing time until we are unblocked, and our resources will likely be reassigned to another project. Although we’ll do our best to switch them back to your project as soon as we’re re-enabled, we cannot guarantee the length of the delay, or the time required to get back up to full speed. 

The OnDemand Time Engagement can be best for a large number of projects:

  • Specific tasks within your larger project 
  • Longer term projects without a hard deadline that can be stopped and started as necessary
  • Projects where you reasonably expect to stop and restart the work (such as bring-up of new hardware which almost always results in a respin of the PCB)
  • On-demand support
  • High level consulting

Which is best for you? When you contact us, we will work with you to determine which model works for your requirements and timeline, and do our best to make your engagement with Konsulko Group efficient and memorable for all the right reasons.