Hey there everybody, it’s Adam Cooley, from the FireByte Group. I wanted to take some time and make a post just introducing who we are and what were all about…
My wife Bethanie and I are native Iowans, with lots of experience in business and technology. Bethanie works for John Deere full time and takes care of the general business and finance parts of the FireByte Group, while I provide the technical consulting, general business direction and brand management. We have six kids (five at home still), Harlow, Foster, Emerson, Will, Cate, and Maddie. They keep us pretty busy, but with all that going on we have some huge goals for ourselves both in business growth vertically and horizontally. I get asked quite a bit what I do, and what the FireByte Group is all about. So here it goes with a little bit of an overview of our business…
My background
I’ve spent the last 25~ years of my career in technology and IT services. Started early out of college helping to support some non profits and a church in Cedar Rapids Iowa, running their windows systems and infrastructure as well as providing support on internet services. I’ve always been fascinated with the concept of communications, so anything from cable to wireless, voice and video, have always been very interesting to me. After a span of 10 years with a couple ISPs, and a consulting firm I got a huge break to work for Juniper Networks as a sales and consulting engineer for about 5 years. What a huge opportunity, I learned so much about the internet, and IPv6 and why it’s important, not to mention all the sweet carrier grade tech and software that goes into making the internet what it is.
About five years into that tenure a previous co-worker, Brice Towns, hit me up about an opportunity working for Meta, he was the regional DC manager of the Altoona campus being started way back in the day. I honestly wasn’t hip on it, I was comfortable and it took about six months of convos and convincing for me to want to make that plunge, but boy I am sure glad I did. Talk about a huge boost in opportunity to learn and walk through numerous evolutions of cutting-edge technology in a few short years making Meta’s backbone and data center networks the biggest in the world! At the time I left the Express Backbone, partly designed, engineered and mostly deployed by myself in it’s first few iterations, is a 1PB core network transporting all those important bits between regions in a fraction of second. You can read all up on that wild ride on the Meta engineering blog https://engineering.fb.com/. And yes Mikel it really was my idea of using a little known BGP link-bandwidth community to develop the unequal multi pathing feature that you so claimed long ago and so conveniently left props to me out of the blog post you turd, haha remembering our convo in Dublin so long ago, wow good times. #neverforget (PSA I got access to the blog and tagged myself at least lol) Juniper Networks pioneered this feature and it was conviently added to Arista Networks source code waaaay back in the day which let us use it, more about all that here.
I literally built billion dollar data center networks, and was kicking off a $30M capital savings project to re-purpose and finally be able to depreciate network infra sitting in warehouses worldwide when on November 9th, 2022 my number was called for a significant role elimination effort at Meta (Ny Times Post). After a few short weeks I decided it was time to own my fate in business, so we dove into creating the FireByte Group and here we are!
What we do
Finally getting around to the what we do! With regards to consulting services, Adam provides network and systems consulting for businesses, VARs, property managers and community living. We’ve created a variety of services specific to multi-tenancy, property managers, and communities, and currently working on a brand launch for FireByte Networks, an ISP dedicated to provide low cost, high performance internet services to compete with those crappy low rent managed services companies like NexGen Communications and ICS. As part of that effort we will provide a full stack of internet services for everyone in your community, as well as new cloud based access control and video security from Verkada. With the evolution of cloud based streaming services, it also makes sense to develop a cloud TV platform to leverage that fresh, new, network, so we will be entertaining a next generation video offering sometime down the line. Finally cloud consulting is a huge part of small business, mid cap and communities. Adam specializes in Microsoft Azure and Office365 adoption, additionally offering voice enabled services for Microsoft Teams. You really should get rid of that old phone system and adopt a cloud first, programmable platform like Microsoft teams. Not only will it save a ton of money but also create a significant amount of adaptability for how your business will operate in the future, and finally breaks that old school vendor lock-in we all absolutely hate.
Lastly let me talk about our rental businesses. Adam’s got a large amount of experience in construction, so sometime in the next 24~ months were launching a few different brands for [LS]TRs. Firstly we’re shooting for larger family, modern cabins near national parks, called The Dens Cabins, fully automated and full of tech to adopt easier management and lower costs, but also creating something that families can enjoy when traveling the country seeing those very popular national parks and sites. Down the line we’ll be potentially creating some long term rental communities focused exclusively on smaller younger families with purpose built single or duplex units, itll include all the amenities and technology younger families need to transition out of multi-unit housing and into something more long term for their families growth. This will all be coupled with a very specific marketing and brand strategy centered around the various area codes we’ve targeted.
That about sums it all up, we’ve got a lot on our plate, not to mention kids activities such as band, soccer, and routine school stuff, we’re really excited what the future holds for us and the FireByte Group, and we’re looking forward to seeing you apart of it too!
