I'm Cameron Childress, the founder and principal software architect for Sumo Consulting. As a small company, Sumo's story is closely tied to my own. So rather than the usual (possibly AI generated) corporate drivel, I invite you to enjoy a possibly self indulgent and definitely long winded tale of how Sumo's origins.
As a testament to my long tenue in the industry, many of the technologies and companies mentioned in this story no longer exist.
The (Internet) Dark Ages
Our adventure starts in the mid-90's. HTML was just gainging traction and blink tags were still a thing, somehow. Everyone had a dumb phone and browsed websites running on bare metal servers (often under someone's desk). The most populat browser was Netscape Navigator and you were stuck with the fastest internet you could get, a 56k ISDN line if you were lucky (Yikes!).
CGI scripts written in PERL were the norm, soon joined by languages like PHP, Microsoft's ASP, and Allaire's ColdFusion. The latter of which, ColdFusion (which was bundled with Orielly Website Pro), caught my attention, leading me to found the Atlanta ColdFusion User Group (ACFUG) and run it for a number of years.
The Dot Com Age
By the late 90's I landed at Atlanta based Ad Agency McRae Communications as their Technology Director. During this time the dot-com bubble started to get huge (Webvan anyone?) and McRae spun off a large project into a startup called Neighborware, where I was VP of Product.
As great of a product as Neighborware was, our timing was terrible. We made the rounds at venture capital firms, slowly realising that the market was crashing around us. Soon it didn't matter how great the product was, the doc-com bubble had burst and funding had dried up right under our noses.
The Birth of Sumo
As the dust settled from the startup market's collapse, I started some consulting work and quickly discovered that I loved the variety and unique situations I ran across.
I was ready to start my own company. But what to name it? I wrote down ideas, opened the thesaurus, but nothing clicked.
Then one sunny day I was walking to Piedmont Park from my Midtown Atlanta apartment and I saw a sign for a lost cat named "Sumo". Then and there I knew that's what the company would be named. Unfortunately, I don't know if the lost namesake of the company was ever found.
Since then Sumo has remained a small and focused company, often partnering with other agencies or individual experts in design and engineering to complete projects.
The Early Days
In the early days Sumo mostly focused on ColdFusion work, often with a focus on operating at scale. We helped Turner Sports rebuild the PGA of America's website from the ground up and scale to crazy high levels (at the time) of bursty traffic. We also developed scalable solutions for companies like AIG and schools like Baylor, NYU, OHSU, University of Alberta and others.
By the mid 2000's Adobe Flex started to gain traction. We used it to build an enterprise sales tool called iMatch (now replaced w/HTML version) for Invitrogen (now part of ThermoFisher Scientific) and a Box Office Point of Sale System for the PGA of America's. The PGA used our system at every one of their events for 10 years until Ticketmaster finally replaced it.
Other notable work during these early years were projects for NATO's NSHQ, Emory University, and the CDC.
The Serverless Age
A lot changed during the 2000's and 2010's and and eventually ColdFusion wasn't the core of our business anymore. We'd pivoted to new ways of developing and operating internet based software.
Microservices, DevOps, and Automation have increasingly become an important part of the digital landscape. Many companies are busy augmenting or replacing their traditional monolithic applications with serverless and cloud computing.
We're helping other companies pivot too. Sumo's able to leverage years of ColdFusion experience to help companies like MotorsportReg evolve their legacy ColdFusion based systems, building serverless APIs and improving DevOps using AWS's cloud native services.
We're also helping companies with greenfield development, including working with Daughters for Earth to build a scalable AI based avatar generator for The Hummingbird Project. Serverless uses less power hungry GPU, which was a big win for this climate change focused organization.
Sumo's Focus Today
Our core focus today is helping organizations work better and more efficiently through CI/CD Automation, DevOps, Infrastructure as Code, and Serverless Application Development.
Leveraging tools like Projen, the AWS CDK, we're able to help organizations ensure that their software is Well Architected and
Let Us Help You!
We've been helping companies evolve their technology for over two decades and we'd love to help you too. Get in touch and let me know how we can work together!
Cameron Childress
cameronc@sumoc.com
678-637-5072