About Mike

Tired of the rat race? I was too, until I decided quit my job in 2005. I’ve been self employed ever since. If you’re looking for advice, random musings, semi-coherent rants and a flagrant distraction from whatever it is that you’re supposed to be doing, then you’ve come to the right place.

My name is Mike Taber. I started Moon River Software and Moon River Consulting as a way to bypass the corporate ladder and avoid what would otherwise be a lot of corporate red tape. In a large company, promotions tend to be guided by seniority which flies in the face of ability and talent. In a small company, you can advance quickly, but you’re still pretty limited in what you can work on by the company itself. Small companies really can’t afford to have a senior developer working on whatever he feels is appropriate at the time. Eventually, I decided I wanted the freedom that only working for myself would provide. Today, I run two legally separate companies.

Moon River Software sells off the shelf software to small and mid-size companies. It’s not much, and certainly not where I make most of my income. It’s where I started my self employment in 2005, so I still keep the business around as it slowly progresses.

Moon River Consulting is where I spend the bulk of my time. In just a few short years, I’ve built Moon River Consulting into a Symantec Gold Partner specializing in Systems Management & Compliance. On the Systems Management side, we deal with the Altiris line of products which manages IT infrastructure, software deployment, OS imaging, and a lot of other things that are IT related. For Compliance, we deal with stuff like PCI, Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA, etc. Basically if there’s an industry or government regulation regarding the security or auditing of a computer system, we’re the guys to talk to.

I travel worldwide for my job and advise companies on their systems management, compliance and security needs. My clients range in size from 500 employees to more than 100,000 and include seven different companies on the Fortune 100 list. They span virtually every market vertical, but mainly focus on health care, financial, and government institutions.

About the Author:
I started my career with a brief, 3 month stint at a start up multimedia company called 2K Innovations Corporation in North Carolina in 1998. I was invited to join full time as a principal, but declined after seeing how the company was being run. Later that year, I moved to Buffalo, NY to work for a wireless ISP startup called Clearwire Technologies. I bailed a couple years before it went under and sold its name, but learned a lot about working at a small company. I spent the next few years working for Wegmans Food Markets in Rochester, NY as a Programmer Analyst, providing me with the experience of working for a 25,000 employee company.

Following a short and unsuccessful solo stint, I wound up at Pedestal Software in Boston. Pedestal was a start up that was acquired by Altiris two years later for $70 million. Six months after the acquisition, I started flying solo again and have been on my own ever since.

I hold Bachelors and Masters degrees in Computer Engineering from the Rochester Institute of Technology where I concentrated on parallel software and artificial intelligence.

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