Guru Design
LLC was founded by and still is owned by Thomas J. Yarsley, who is known
to family, friends, and colleagues simply as “Yars.”The firm is located in the western part of Massachusetts, at the
crossroads of I-90 and I-91.
Straddling the Connecticut River, the
“Pioneer Valley” has a long and rich history of technological
innovation; Yars and his colleagues are proud inheritors of its tradition of
“Yankee ingenuity.”
Downtown Springfield, Massachusetts, as seen
looking eastward from our location in West Springfield
Until 2012, our bread and butter exclusively was
offering technology-focused consulting services and solutions, including
contract product design and low-volume manufacturing.We keep our customers’ costs as low as we can, in part by keeping our
own overhead costs to a minimum.We do this by organizing our staffing around a project-based model.
This practice became increasingly
popular over the last 25 years or so; in the 21st century, "outsourcing" is
an accepted global paradigm – all kinds of organizations, large and small,
do a surprising amount of it every day.
Simply put, Guru is a managed collection of
experienced technical talent – a flexible virtual project team, if you will.It is not a head-hunting firm, nor is it a “job shop” that supplies
hourly talent in various disciplines.It is an affordable full-service consulting and design house that is
small enough to offer a personal touch, but capable enough to get your job
done.
Most of our customers are larger organizations –
some quite large – who neither have nor wish to acquire ample internal
capacity to execute some project or organizational function.We’ve done work for entities in both the private and public sectors;
for-profit firms and non-profit organizations; government and military
customers.The common thread is
that we take the time to understand our customers’ objectives and needs,
allowing them to leverage our expertise into an attractive value
proposition.And because most
of our work has been challenging bleeding-edge stuff, we get to have fun
while we’re doing it!
Many of our customers prefer to keep our
relationship unseen.Whether
it’s a classified military project or just a case of not wanting to reveal a
resort to outsourcing, we know how to be discrete.We make a very nice living by being helpful; our customers can take
the curtain calls.We encourage
you to
contact us, to engage in a dialogue about how we might be helpful
to you.
Historically, as a small independent design
house, we’ve offered customized solutions to our client organizations, and
we’ve had no stable of in-house standard products that we offered for sale.Yet, over time, many clients have expressed a desire for larger,
more-comprehensive software solutions whose development costs would vastly
exceed their individual project budgets.
In response to those desires, in 2008 Guru began work
on an internal development project with the goal of creating an
enterprise-class commercial product to address clients’ needs.In 2011, another long-time customer approached us with a specific
project need, but our analysis concluded that development of a proprietary
solution was well beyond their budgetary constraints.A member of our development team pointed out that what the client was
asking for was basically a standalone implementation of a small feature
subset of the large product that we already were working on.That insight eventually led to a decision to create a focused, simple
front end interface to the elaborate SQL back end database of the larger
product.
The result is the 2012 release of the first member of
a planned family of Silverlight SaaS web applications, under our
SPARQi
brand – a hosted solution for our
customer, at less than 2% of the cost of developing a proprietary
application.
SPARQi ERM (Event Records Management) is a
comprehensive solution to managing the operations of players in the cottage
industry that has evolved around providing Continuing Education and
Professional Development services for the one-of-every-seven American
workers whose jobs require some kind of a professional or trade license.
SPARQi serves the needs of the
CE/PD industry’s four stakeholder groups
License-holders
Provider organizations
Presenters of course material
Regulatory/oversight bodies
by uniting their logistics with their
recordkeeping, and by uniting their Enrollment, Payment, and Education
activities in one comprehensive, easy-to-use application.
You can access the SPARQi website by clicking on the SPARQi mascot
image below.