What is your name, title, and role at your company?
Seth Berman, President and CEO of Instantiations. As a small business owner, I wear quite a few hats in our organization. Outside of obvious strategic roles, I’m still involved in the technology side of the business. I started my tenure at Instantiations as a Senior Software Engineer, and I continue to solve technical problems with our engineering team when time allows.
What does your company do?
Instantiations is a company that specializes in custom software engineering. Two of our core specialties are programming language runtimes and development platform tooling. These are both showcased by our main product: the VAST Platform. In short, the VAST Platform is a collection of advanced tools that help developers program the software they need. As you can imagine, creating something as complex as a development platform requires us to have an exceptional team with a variety of skill sets as well as in-depth knowledge of how developers work. We constantly keep up to date with standards in the software development community and ensure our platform’s user experience is at the forefront. Additionally, we share this expertise through development, consulting, and training services. Banking, insurance, manufacturing, and even other software development companies have used our services over the years. Typically, when the problems get too hard for an internal team to solve, Instantiations gets called in to help. While we’ve traditionally served large enterprises, we’ve been expanding to serve businesses of all sizes with “enterprise-grade” solutions.
What are some neat projects that your company is currently working on?
For the VAST Platform, we are finalizing best-in-class Unicode support by using technology from the Rust programming language. Additionally, we are adding some really cool asynchronous frameworks to provide an even more powerful programming experience. For those less versed in what these things are, we are adding a type of Unicode (character encoding) support that can easily and consistently handle all the world’s languages and emojis when displaying and manipulating text. As far as asynchronous programming, it really comes down to providing full support for the easy maintenance and debugging of all the parallel tasks that are interacting in software. Outside of VAST, we are working on new libraries to expand Toit: an object-oriented language designed for IoT and microcontrollers. We are also involved in the Dart and Flutter communities which provide a really good option for cross platform development. All these technologies are very powerful and are opening new doors for effective and efficient programming in IoT spaces and beyond.
How would you describe your company’s culture?
Instantiations is centered around forging strong and meaningful partnerships, not just internally but with our customers as well. Our team is a tight group of folks who have been working together for years or sometimes decades. We have a caring and familiar attitude that is extended out to our customers when we work with them, and we ensure their requirements are met in the same way we’d want them to be with our own projects. As a result, many of our customers have said we feel more like an extension of their own team instead of an outside resource.
How does your company differentiate itself from your competitors?
Many times it’s about the personal and hands-on service we provide, but it’s also about the way we create software. We certainly address the immediate requirements when building something new, but we also factor in our knowledge of where technology is headed and how to best prepare that software for updates and shifts in best practices. Far too often we see our competitors gravitating towards the shiniest new technology, and not thinking about long-term maintainability, stability, and performance. There are many shops out there that can make software work, but can they make it perform well for the long-haul? Or for decades even? We have been a software company for more than 30 years, and we know what it takes to make great software and continue to support it for our customers.
What are some things you are excited about for your company for 2022?
Much of 2021 was laying the foundational pieces for our business where we enhanced our technology, services, sales, and marketing. Beyond that, we are improving the VAST Platform itself with technologies for new environments such as ARM-based cloud services, IoT, mobile, and the web. Further research and development will open up more possibilities and exciting developments outside of VAST. 2022 is going to be another year of investment, expansion, and a continuation of everything we have been doing in 2021.
Is there anything additional you would like to share about your company?
As I mentioned earlier, Instantiations has been around for more than 30 years, and during that time we have partnered with all types of companies and customers to create some really incredible software. It’s led them to become more successful, and we wouldn’t be here today if we didn’t keep delivering on that value. If you need to make your software more efficient, have a tough problem to solve, or need a new custom software solution, I encourage you to reach out.