We Eat our own Dog Food!

At BDPNetworks, we are agnostic in our recommendations: we are uniquely positioned to give you honest, objective advice about products and services that will benefit your business because we don’t make our money by selling you products and services. We only get paid by providing you with our service.

Even so, we won’t recommend any product or service we haven’t physically used ourselves – and in most cases it’ll be something that we’ve used internally for years. The tech industry term for this is “dogfooding” — We eat our own dog food.

Case in point: wireless access points for small businesses. We noticed that dependence on wireless access points has increased dramatically over the past few years: that $100 consumer-grade WiFi unit from Best Buy is just not going to cut it anymore.  So we’ve spent the last three years really researching this field ourselves, buying commercial and consumer-grade equipment from a wide range of vendors at retail prices with our own money and testing these units extensively. We’ve found that there isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution and that some access points are stronger than others when it comes to range, or administration, or security, or scalability, or speed.  So when you need access points we’re in a very unique position to give you the best advice about the brands that will work best for your situation. Nobody else does this.

Another case: we’ve been using Office365 extensively ourselves for over a year. We’ve separated the marketing hype from the reality of the service and have determined through extensive trial and error that it’s ready for prime time for some clients but still isn’t a good fit for larger clients. But it might be. And some of our clients may be better off not pursuing Office365 at all for the foreseeable future.  These are the discussions we have with each individual client and our high-level consultative services based on real-world use.

We eat our own dog food so you don’t have to!