The thorny path of a young company

Introduction

We are all accustomed to the fact that every day a sufficiently large number of startups are born. Nowadays, on the one hand, it has become fashionable, but on the other hand, the common man has a real opportunity to make something of his own and make money from it.

In my opinion, most startups are created on the Internet or for mobile platforms. These include various websites, web services, social networking applications, and applications for numerous gadgets.

If we look at the functions that these startups perform, then most of them are small application applications that have a good user interface and several unique functions. The main problems that startups have to solve are either attracting the target audience to their own resources, or optimizing the project for the arising workload.
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In my opinion, the emergence of such startups and their immense popularity is associated with a huge “un-plowed” field of applied tasks that can be automated or computerized. Such startups and projects are necessary and very useful for our society.

"Other" projects

But I want to talk about other projects that have recently appeared less and less. I'm talking about research or highbrow projects. Where a lot of unknown and little-studied, where to achieve the goal requires research and a certain scientific, if I may say so. After all, almost no one is currently engaged in research or the creation of operating systems, the development of file systems, protection systems or databases. No, don't get me wrong, such projects, of course, exist, but their total number is minimal, if we consider the situation as a whole.

I always wanted to do something special in my life, something complicated, where I would have to do research, use mathematics and optimization, and most importantly, a lot depended on the correctness and stability of the written code.

So in 2006, the idea came to write a protection system for the Microsoft Windows operating system that would be faster, more functional, more stable, and technically more advanced than all existing solutions. Of course, the task was very ambitious and difficult, so we decided to start small, namely with the development of a personal firewall. Next, a proactive protection module appeared, then, by connecting them, we received the Security Suite, which is able to provide decent protection against all modern types of threats.

It took us about 4 years to implement the current version of Online Solutions Security Suite (OSSS) . Great work has been done, a lot of research has been done and thousands of lines of code have been written.

Problems that had to be solved

Search for qualified people

Yes, I never thought that among programmers there are very few who can really perform complex tasks, be able to optimize code, work well with data structures, and generally write a lot of useful, high-quality and understandable code.

Usually, everything is limited to basic knowledge and buzzwords about design patterns (templates). It was also surprising that people very rarely turn to official documentation or standards, and often resort to searching for ready-made solutions in google. That is, programming is reduced to trying to get the desired result by pulling other people's solutions from all sides and combining them into one. There are units of those who understand how the computer works inside, what and how the compiler does, how to write a multithreaded application correctly and through what objects and how to synchronize them correctly. That is, almost everyone pointed out such words in the summary, but the commonplace task of synchronization introduced people into a stupor, and the written code often shocked me. Similarly, people wondered about combinatorics or the complexity of algorithms.

Search for adequate people

Finding a qualified specialist is difficult, and finding a qualified and adequate person is very difficult.

There were cases when a person performed a test task well, but when communicating it turned out to be a rather strange person. Of course, all people are different, but when you put together a team to develop a complex project, the common values ​​and views on life of the whole team should be similar.

Search for motivated people

If it is very difficult to find a qualified specialist, adequate and qualified, it is very difficult, then purposeful, adequate and qualified is almost unreal.

In all books on project management and training a lot of talk about the role of the leader, but as our experience shows, in addition to the leader, you need to gather motivated and interested people. No leader will be able to lead people for a long time, if they are not interested in the result and in achieving their goals.

As I have already said, it is extremely difficult to find such people, but we managed to do it and now the backbone of the team has very serious knowledge and experience, and the desire to achieve global recognition pushes everyone to solve problems even faster and better.

Requirements development

It is enough just to develop a product, when an analyst has already worked, when all requirements are formalized and well decorated. It is enough for the developer to write the code and the tester to check it. Everything changes when the developer himself writes the requirements for the product, and he doesn’t know what the user really needs, what works in the depth of NDIS, or how the “communication” in LPC works.

Development of new and unknown

When developing for a closed platform, when a lot of things have to be reversed, when there is no confidence in the possibility of obtaining the necessary data at the right time, when there is no confidence in the theoretical possibility of implementing the plan, it is very difficult to work, and developing adequate, understandable and timely requirements is almost unreal.

Motivation

Despite the best team, interesting and challenging tasks - working for a long time without visible results is very, very difficult. So, it took us more than a year to study the internal structure of the network subsystem, the file subsystem and other low-level things. The first public version of the main product had to wait about 3 years. Working in such conditions is extremely difficult.

Gained knowledge and experience

In this life everything is possible

And you can find the money, and the team to collect. The main thing is to believe in what you are doing and doing, and not thinking about it!

Difficult things can create very small teams.

Our example confirmed that very small teams of purposeful people are able to come up with and implement world-class technical solutions. You do not need to have 100 engineers and 20 managers to develop a complex low-level application that controls all critical operations occurring in the core of the operating system.

Simple people, not mega-stars create products

Our experience has shown that many professionals and experts are more accustomed to giving advice or teaching, but when it comes to real business and responsibility for the result, these mega-stars usually go away, coming up with all sorts of pretexts. The real result is achieved by ordinary people who are motivated to work and who are simply responsible for the result.

There is nothing simple in life

Nothing is done just like that. You can not achieve a meaningful result without spending effort, not sitting at night for the release of the release, not arguing in the smoking room and not thinking in the shower at the expense of the work of your team or your code. Nothing happens for free, and the developer pays his time with his family or his girlfriend, sleepless nights and spoiled coffee cookies for the opportunity to realize a world-class product.

let me introduce myself

I could tell a lot about how our company and our products were created, about the mistakes that were made, and about each of our achievements, but first I want to present our company and the flagship product to the habra community.

So, our company is called Online Solutions Ltd. Established in 2006 in the city of St. Petersburg. The main activity of the company is the development of new software products to protect end users from all modern types of threats (viruses, Trojans, rootkits, etc.). Company Information: http://www.online-solutions.ru

The main product of the company is a proactive protection system with a powerful firewall - Online Solutions Security Suite .

At the moment, the program is designed for an advanced user who has an understanding of the operating system processes and the principles of the network.

For an understanding person, configuring the system will take no more than 1-2 hours during normal operation. After properly configured, proactive protection provides almost 100% protection against all known types of threats, and a powerful firewall allows you to fine-tune the network policy, almost without slowing down the transfer of data.

The program belongs to the class of programs that prevent the penetration of malicious programs on a computer, and not to the class of antiviruses aimed at treating an already infected machine, therefore, to ensure security, preventive methods are used to detect and counter malicious code.

The main advantages of our program at the moment are:
• superior technical solutions
• lack of "crutches" aimed at passing the tests
• high speed,
• minimum consumption of system resources
• a rich set of rules for the organization of protection,
• strict and intuitive tech interface.

We invite everyone to take part in testing our products. Beta testers are actively sought, and in general it is very interesting to hear the community’s opinion on new companies and their products in the information security market.

We are waiting for your comments.

PS We know that the world news has not been updated on the site for more than a year :)
See the company's news, not the world (they are located on the left) :)

PPS In the near future (2-3 weeks), wait for a huge update of the OSSS functionality. Support for NAT, DHCP, RAW sockets, search and removal of modern viruses and rootkits using the integrated antivirus module OSAM and much more.