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There is a new clock above court 1 at tennis club Hiaten, and our name is on it. A clock at a tennis park is not a billboard: it is the thing everyone looks at exactly when it matters. When does the next round start, how much longer will this match take, will we finish before the light goes.
That is why it suits us. Service is about timing. An incident picked up within minutes is a different story from the same incident left for half a day; a migration in the weekend goes unnoticed, the same migration on a Tuesday morning is noticed by everyone. What we sell is not so much technology as the certainty that someone looks in time.
Why a tennis club?
SBA is based in Hendrik-Ido-Ambacht, and T.V. Hiaten is the club around the corner. A good part of our customers are exactly this kind of organization: no IT department of their own, but people who keep everything running next to their day job — the membership records, the court booking system, the website, the till in the clubhouse. Anyone who has ever volunteered at a club knows it: most of the work is invisible, until the one time it was not done.
That is also why we did not choose a board along the court. A board hangs there; a clock does something, every minute, for everyone at the park. Sponsorship that is useful suits us better than sponsorship that stands out.
What timing means in IT
The comparison with our work is less far-fetched than it sounds. Three examples from an ordinary week:
- The 8:52 incident. Eight minutes before the shop opens the till stops working. Someone on the line within a quarter of an hour, or only after lunch — that is the difference between an anecdote and a lost morning.
- The Saturday night migration. Moving servers, migrating mailboxes, a new firewall: planned in the weekend, nobody notices. The same work on a weekday morning brings a company to a halt. The work is the same; the timing is the product.
- The update that can wait — and the patch that cannot. Part of our trade is knowing what must happen today and what may wait until next week. A vulnerability with an active exploit is a today thing, always.
A site of its own for the story
The sponsorship comes with a small separate story at hiaten.sba.nl: one page, with a clock running live — the same time as above court 1 — and the story behind the sponsorship.
That page is deliberately also a small showcase of how we build. No theme from a catalogue, no page builder, no cookie wall: a hand-designed page that loads in a fraction of a second, works on a phone as well as on a large screen, and whose clock simply reads the system time of your own device — no server needed, no tracking, always right.
Come and have a look
If you play at Hiaten, or visit the park some time: now you know where to read the time. And if you would like to know what we can do with timing in your IT — from a servicedesk that answers to a migration nobody notices: call 088 340 0047, or ask your question right here in the conversation.