The HAVOC IT Manifesto

This manifesto was drafted with the help of artificial intelligence, and we have chosen to say so from the outset. We are technical people. We use technology when it helps us work faster, explore more possibilities and turn ideas into tangible results more efficiently. It would be strange to recommend those benefits to our clients while refusing to use them ourselves.

The ideas, opinions and principles in this manifesto are ours. AI helped us draft and structure them—and, inevitably, tidy up a few commas. Responsibility for every statement remains ours. To us, this is one of the simplest examples of how technology should be used: not as a substitute for thought, but as a tool that helps people move more quickly from an idea to a result.

Who we are

HAVOC IT was founded by two people with technical backgrounds. We have chosen to stay directly involved in both the engineering and the sale of our services. If you negotiate a contract with us, you will not speak only to a salesperson who makes a promise and disappears once the signature is dry. You will speak to the people who then have to understand the problem, stand behind the solution and, in many cases, implement it. That gives us very little reason to promise the impossible. We would rather describe the situation as it is: what works, what does not, where the risk sits, which options are realistic, what should change now, what can wait, and what makes sense for your company and your budget. Sometimes the answer will be a new technology. Sometimes it will be repairing what you already have. Sometimes the right answer will be to buy nothing at all.

Our experience covers Windows and Linux server administration, networking, virtualisation, Microsoft 365, databases, ERP systems, websites and internal applications, automation, DevOps, containers, cloud and cyber security. We do not treat these as separate drawers. Infrastructure is a system: a problem that looks like a network fault may begin in an application, while an apparent application fault may originate in a database, authentication, an operating system or a firewall.

This is where our competence lies: working across disciplines, seeing the connections and following a problem through the wider system.

When a situation requires the depth of a specialist in a narrow field, we involve or escalate to the right person. We remain responsible for the wider picture, for coordinating the solution and for making sure it works inside the client’s real infrastructure.

Experience has taught us to look for those connections and recognise patterns. Artificial intelligence has added something valuable to the way we work: it lets us research, compare, verify and explore technologies and solutions far more quickly, including those we do not use every day. We do not mistake an AI answer for technical truth, and we do not believe a prompt can replace experience. But technical experience, curiosity, the ability to connect systems and the tools now available to us make it possible to approach a problem from several directions.

We think that combination is less common than it appears. Not because other founders of IT companies are less intelligent or less capable, but because many businesses are built around a specialism, a product or a vendor. We want to preserve the freedom to understand the problem before choosing the technology.

We do not want to force every problem into the solutions we already know. We want to understand the problem first, then choose the solution that fits.

And since we listed technologies: yes, that was marketing. We know. We just used it.

Romania has a great many excellent people working in IT. Some work in large companies, some are contractors and some have built their own firms. Many have contributed to complex projects, important infrastructure and recognised organisations. Having once worked on a project that carried a familiar logo does not automatically make anyone better at solving the problem facing a ten-person company in Timișoara today. Experience matters to us only when it helps us make a better decision for the client in front of us now.

What we want to build

Our aim is ambitious, and we are comfortable saying it plainly: we want to provide some of the best IT services available in our local Romanian markets, particularly in Timiș and the area where we can work directly with our clients. We like competition. We like having alternatives. We like being given a problem and finding out whether we can produce a solution that is better, simpler, safer or more efficient than the alternatives.

We are competitive because we trust what we can do, and because every project requires us to prove it again. We do not want to enter a company asking, “What can we sell here?” The question that matters is: “What is the best solution we can build within the conditions we actually have?”

Those conditions matter. The budget matters. Existing infrastructure matters. The people who will use the system matter. Time matters. The cost of maintaining the solution in two or three years matters. A solution that is perfect on paper but impossible for the client to afford or operate is not a good solution. The cheapest option is not necessarily a saving if it has to be replaced six months later. We do not want to win a technical argument and lose sight of the business we are building for. Our job is to balance what is technically possible, what is financially justified and what makes sense in the real world.

We have no technology religion

We are technology agnostic. We do not support Windows as a team. We do not support Linux as a team. We do not pledge allegiance to Microsoft, Cisco, TP-Link, Ubiquiti, VMware, Proxmox or any other logo that might appear in a rack, on a laptop, in a cloud platform or in a licensing agreement. We have no interest in proving that our favourite technology is better than someone else's. We care whether it works for the client.

If a solution is stable, secure, manageable, solves the problem and fits the budget, it deserves consideration. A vendor should not be chosen because “that is how it is done”. An operating system should not be selected because we happen to like it. A company should not have to rebuild its infrastructure simply to fit our preferred stack.

Technology should adapt to the company, not the company to the technology.

We do have a preference: we like open source. Not as a rival religion to commercial software, and not because we want to turn every client into a Linux laboratory. We like it because excellent open-source technologies can solve real problems without forcing a client into permanent licence charges or costs dictated by one vendor. When an open-source option is good, secure and sustainable, we will put it on the table. When a commercial product is better, safer or simply more appropriate, we will put that on the table instead.

We gain nothing by steering a client towards our favourite technology. We gain when the decision we made together still makes sense for that company years later.

That is the idea connecting everything else: we do not want to sell technology simply because we can. We want to understand the problem, see the wider system and choose the right solution—even when it is not the most spectacular, the most expensive or the one we would have selected for ourselves.

What should endure

We do not know what HAVOC IT will look like in ten years. We hope the technologies we use then will not be exactly the ones we use today. It would be strange to remain unchanged in a field that moves this quickly. New technologies, new vendors and new problems will appear, along with tools we do not yet know we will need. The principles behind our work should be more durable.

We want to be curious before we become certain. We want to understand before we recommend, and compare before we buy. When we do not know, we want to say so and find the answer rather than improvise one. We want to be able to tell a client that they do not need the thing they planned to buy, even when selling it would earn us more. We also want to change a solution we once recommended when reality shows that a better option now exists.

We will not promise to have the right answer immediately, every time. In IT, anyone making that promise has probably never met a sufficiently difficult problem—or has forgotten what one looks like. We can promise to take the problem seriously, to look for the cause before treating the symptom and not to hide uncertainty behind jargon.

Perhaps HAVOC IT will become a much larger company. Perhaps it will remain a relatively small team. We do not know, and we do not want to build the company around a number alone. We want to grow for as long as we can preserve what made us begin: technical curiosity, the satisfaction of solving problems and the freedom to say that the right tool is the one that solves the client's problem, not the one we have an interest in selling.

If we had to reduce this entire manifesto to one idea, it would probably be this:

We do not want to sell you as much technology as possible. We want to help you choose it, understand it and use it as well as possible.

The rest is just tech.