As a company we are passionate about what we do. I personally love it. I mean it. I love what we do. Getting up in the morning and working with talented folks like Akshith, Ulises, Pablo, Ken, Jason, Carissa and many others is what I really love to do. Be careful of asking me about passion because I will talk your ear off!  I will tell you yarns about LaMont being stuck in an ice storm (Very funny now, not funny then) en route to delivering solutions for a banking customer. I will chatter at length about software delivered in Riyadh under the most stressful and difficult of situations. We can recount the decision to open our European operation and then expand that into a Spanish subsidiary because we genuinely believed that there was a need for our services and that we could bring value. Each one of these tough decisions (and funny stories) had at its core, a real passion for what we do. 

Much like each of you I had many sleepless nights over the last 12 months. From a business standpoint, like countless other companies, I had to make some very hard decisions, that were not taken lightly. 

The health of family, colleagues, friends, and partners was top of mind but at the same time the health of the company as we employ quite a few folks who depend on our business for mortgage payments, healthcare, work visas and to simply put bread on the table. 

When you have to make these decisions that have real-life results, it can impact trust. I felt like I had let some folks down and lost their trust when we had to let a few folks go and this really hit me on a personal level. I know the rest of the management team were as devastated by the decision.

Trust is a core tenet of mine and our company and when we lose trust it hurts us deeply. 
That being said our clients and our partners such as Red Hat trusted us a lot and vice versa. Trust is earned not given or bought. The trust we put in Red Hat is without question and I think the award in an indication that this is a two-way street.