Know exactly where your platform stands. Then we build the fix with you.
Northbound Navigators is a consulting firm for infrastructure teams. We measure your platform, network, or technical sales motion against a clear maturity model, then do the engineering work alongside your people to move it up.
No 80-slide deck you file and forget. A scored baseline, a budgeted roadmap, and hands on keyboards.
- 01Ad-hocReactive and manual
- 02RepeatableStandards, applied unevenly
- 03DefinedDocumented and automated
- 04ManagedMeasured and SLO-driven
- 05OptimizedSelf-service, always improving
- Rackspace
- Red Hat
- Docker
- Nutanix
- HashiCorp
- Oracle
- BMC
- BladeLogic
- Clear Channel
- AWS
You already know something is off. The signals are just hard to price.
Naming the symptom is easy. Knowing which one will wake you up next is the hard part.
- Deploys that should take hours take weeks, and no one can say exactly why.
- A network that has quietly grown single points of failure you only find during an outage.
- Cloud spend climbing faster than the value it returns.
The cost of guessing is real. The cost of a full re-platform you did not need is worse.
Talk it through with usFour practices. Each starts with a measurement, then continues into delivery.
Every engagement begins with a fixed-scope read on where you stand, then does the work that earns its place on the roadmap.
Platform Engineering
Turn a pile of clusters and pipelines into a real internal platform, one your developers choose to use because it's faster than going around it.
- Architecture
- Kubernetes
- Developer experience
- Golden paths
Resilient Networking
Hybrid-cloud and enterprise networks engineered to stay up, designed for the failure modes you'll actually hit, not the ones that look good on a diagram.
- Hybrid-cloud
- Enterprise networking
- High availability
- DNS & routing
Technical GTM
For infra and dev-tool vendors: bridge the gap between "engineers love it" and "the enterprise bought it." We speak both languages fluently.
- Buyer enablement
- Technical narrative
- Reference architectures
- Proof-of-concept design
AI Enablement
Practical AI training for non-technical teams, so the tools your organization already pays for actually change how the work gets done.
- Team training
- Workflow design
- Prompting practice
- Safe adoption
We scope it, we price it, and we do the work.
You get a partner who has run this infrastructure, not a generalist reading from a playbook.
Talk to a founderThree things you can act on the same week.
Every engagement scores your estate on a five-level model, from ad-hoc to optimized, across the dimensions that decide reliability, cost, and speed.
A read your board can act on
An executive summary your CIO and board can read in five minutes, backed by a scored baseline.
A prioritized 90-day roadmap
The few changes that move the most, sequenced by value, effort, and risk.
A cost-to-implement estimate
Investment bands and a business case for each initiative, so nothing gets funded on a hunch.
- 01 Discover
- 02 Assess
- 03 Synthesize
- 04 Present
If one of these is you, a call will tell you whether we can help.
And if we cannot, we will say so.
- 01Enterprise IT leaders whose platform maturity has not kept pace with the business.
- 02Mid-market teams who need a platform that scales without a big-firm budget.
- 03Enterprises tired of data-center and network outages they cannot fully explain.
- 04Seed to Series C infrastructure and dev-tool startups building or leveling up a technical pre-sales team.
Two engineers who spent their careers inside the systems you are trying to fix.
When you hire us, you get them, not a pyramid of juniors.
Arthur
Platform & Cloud
AI Enablement
Technical GTM
Technology and security leader with almost 30 years of experience in cloud, containers, open source, and enterprise architecture. He combines hands-on technical depth with global solutions leadership, helping enterprise teams move from strategy through production implementation.
- Motorola
- Rackspace
- Capital Group
- Red Hat
- Docker
- Nutanix
- HashiCorp
Doug
Resilient Networking
Data-Center Design
Automation Engineering
Enterprise infrastructure and cloud architecture leader with more than 20 years of experience across a broad range of industries. He specializes in cloud strategy, infrastructure transformation, automation, and scalable architecture, combining strategic insight with hands-on operational expertise.
- Rackspace
- Oracle
- BMC
- BladeLogic
- Clear Channel
- AWS
- Nielsen
Stop guessing where your platform stands.
Email us for a 30-minute scoping call. We will ask a few sharp questions, tell you whether an assessment fits, and give you something useful whether or not you hire us.