Solbyco isn't new. The idea is older than the name.
In 1998, early in my career at Heijmans, a good friend and then IT director John Pieper and I built an application to fix an inefficient process: IT requests that had to pass more than a hundred approving directors, with no clear workflow or overview. It became CHIPS — Change Information & Processing System: a web application with a service catalogue, an approval and workflow module, and integrations with suppliers such as Dell. CHIPS grew into a widely used application with several developers who each made a substantial contribution, and it became the subject of my thesis for the EDP-audit programme at Tias (cohort 13): CHIPS itself wasn't graded there, but whether the application met the requirements Heijmans had set for it — as part of my own assessment in that programme, led at the time by professor Moonen.
More ideas followed. Some of them worked. In 1999, a web application on the intranet — with authorisation workflows and a database of standard texts — let HR publish vacancies directly to Heijmans's external website, with no involvement from IT: articles were delivered straight to the site, then hosted at KPN, via database replication. What's taken for granted today was fairly revolutionary in 1999.
Other ideas didn't make it. PIM (Problem & Incident Management) was meant to replace an archaic helpdesk package, but stalled because application development wasn't seen as core business at Heijmans — a fair call.
Solbyco — solutions by components — is what remains when you take those lessons seriously: not every idea has to succeed, but the idea itself — bringing components together into a working solution — turned out to be worth picking up again after all these years.
What we do
Solution management has been the way ideas live on for more than twenty years now, across companies: from IBM to T-Systems, from T-Systems to HP — which became HPE and later DXC along the way — and from there to Atos.
Atos positions itself today as the party that delivers sovereign solutions and AI. LocalChat is a direct result of that.
LocalChat
One of our open-source projects: a self-hosted platform for chatting with your own documents through a language model that runs entirely on your own hardware — nothing leaves the machine unless you turn that on yourself.
How we work
SolByCo advises people and organisations on IT matters. Always with solutions.
A problem only becomes a solution once you stop expecting it to have been otherwise. Buddhists call attachment to expectation the source of suffering; Taoism recommends moving with the current instead of against it; Stoics separate what lies within your power from what doesn't. PIM didn't make it — not because the idea was bad, but because it suited a different company than Heijmans was at the time. That's not a loss to mourn, but a given to accept and build from: amor fati, not as resignation but as a starting point. That's how SolByCo works — not fighting what an organisation is, but building from there toward what it needs.
Contact: via my LinkedIn.
Jan Willem van der Stam