Data Team Manager Bruce Williams reflects on a busy 2011 for his team and in the industry

Our 2011 recap chatter series continues as Bruce Williams, Data team manager, reviews an eventful year as his team added members and expanded services.

We didn’t sit still in 2011, nor did we sell off our belongings and wait for the apocalypse. Some believe that 2012 will be marking the end of days; we in the development world would simply settle for the end of some inferior browsers as well as the wide adoption of new technologies and services by our clients.

Going through our 2011 yearbook, we found it to be one of the busiest in planning and architecting new, custom solutions with our clients. This past year, we reiterated that we can execute just about any digital project imaginable, and we also found that a good deal of our time was dedicated to mapping and developing new processes and applications for our clients. Not only did these requests come from new clients and potentials, but also from our very valued existing client base.

As demand grows for our thought leadership, we still need to attend to and deliver on time the many diverse projects we are so graciously awarded. That is why we were very grateful for the efforts produced by some of the new team members. Savvy veteran Justin Smith came aboard this past year and produced an amazing portfolio of results not only in Web and client-side development, but also in multimedia work. Nathan Smetana joined the team as the ever-available intern to expedite projects and provide an even greater degree of service to our existing clients.

With these two additions and the very experienced senior leadership of Jerry Sen in application development, Josh Mathe in search marketing, Chris Knapik in all things networking and digital and Benjamin John in client-side engineering, we found ourselves taking on an amazing number of diverse projects.

The two hottest areas of work right now are in the mobile space and search marketing, and we believe we have excelled in both during this past year. Clients such as DDR, Cedar Point, COSE and Winking Lizard all have emphasized and catered to the evolving mobile consumer with their own offerings with great success. We were lucky enough to execute projects using traditional mobile-optimized Web applications and native iOS and Android applications.


Our search marketing clients have come back again and again for recommendations after realizing return on investment (ROI) success after success.

On top of mobile, we have been awarded the opportunity to take many of our clients online with e-commerce offerings, redesigns of legacy sites and installations of various content management system (CMS) platforms.

Our social platform and third-party service integration footprint was expanded as well. We created numerous Facebook applications as well as leveraged services and application programming interfaces (APIs) provided by Twitter, Salesforce, Google and other leaders for specific and focused marketing campaigns for our clients.

Our method of operation has been refined and polished this past year out of necessity. We have increased our manner of communication and continued coding improvements internally through collaboration and research and development.

Like any self-improving organization, we have audited existing partnerships and pursued new ones. With mobile and high-performing client applications in mind, we have initiated partnerships with Rackspace, specifically their Cloud-based products, and Sitecore CMS offerings.

As we look into our crystal ball to see what 2012 may offer, we realize that our crystal ball is no longer holding onto the appropriate browser market share and we should be consulting our Android for a more widely adopted user experience.

Alas, it is all in a year’s work for the thunder::tech Data team. We won’t be standing still in 2012 and we anticipate that our clients won’t either.

About the author::
Bruce Williams loves a good database schema and watching his team astonish clients with new JQuery tricks. He is the Data team manager at thunder::tech during the day (and occasionally at night). When he isn’t programming, he and his wife are pulling their kids through the neighborhood in their favorite wagon.

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