Talvara began in March 2017 with two people and one shared irritation. Ilze Bērziņa
had spent six years running messaging for a Baltic logistics group; Marek Sildaru had
spent rather longer keeping mail alive for a university and then for a regional
hosting provider. Between them they had been handed the aftermath of roughly a dozen
migrations delivered by large integrators.
The pattern was consistent. The migration itself would be declared a success on the
basis that mailboxes had moved. Six weeks later the invoices would stop arriving at
customers, the archive would turn out to have captured nothing since the cutover, and
a printer in a warehouse would still be relaying through a decommissioned server that
nobody could safely switch off. The integrator had moved on. The people left holding
it had never been given a diagram.
The founding proposition was narrow and slightly unfashionable: treat email as
infrastructure, staff it properly, write everything down, and hand the documentation
to the client rather than keeping it as leverage. The first client was a
seventy-person freight forwarder in Riga whose mail had been on a blocklist for
eleven weeks. That engagement is still running.
We have grown slowly and on revenue. There is no outside investment, which is why
this page contains no growth chart and why we have never been under pressure to
expand into services we would be mediocre at. The firm is twenty-four people. We
expect it to be around thirty in three years, and that is the plan rather than a
constraint we are working to escape.