About

A small firm with enterprise bench depth.

Two principal engineers, 50+ years combined, multi-vertical depth across healthcare, finance, and global enterprise infrastructure. Based in Naperville, IL.

The team

Built where the rigor mattered.

Most managed services providers sell tier-1 dispatchers as engineers. We do not. Two principal engineers, each with 26+ years of network and infrastructure work at the enterprise tier, on every engagement we take.

Network architecture lead

Brian Kennedy

26+ years designing and operating enterprise network infrastructure. Cisco ACI fabric specialist with VXLAN/EVPN at scale. Embedded engagements at major academic medical centers, financial trading floors, and Fortune 500 global enterprises. Most recent named work: active/active datacenter recovery for a Chicago-area academic medical center -- zero data loss, five-to-ten-minute full-site failover, in production.

Verticals: healthcare, financial services, manufacturing, global enterprise.

Platform & infrastructure lead

Bill

26+ years building and operating enterprise infrastructure platforms. Career embedded with major consulting firms -- Tetra Tech, West Monroe Partners, Slalom -- delivering for Fortune 500 clients across multiple verticals. Deep experience in cloud transformations, observability platform design, and multi-site infrastructure operations.

Verticals: enterprise IT transformation, cloud, observability, platform engineering.

We are deliberately small. As we grow we will hire engineers, not dispatchers.

Track record

Verticals we know intimately.

Sixty-six enterprise engagements across our careers. Customer names stay private; the verticals and the depth speak for themselves.

20+

Healthcare organizations

Academic medical centers, regional hospital systems, cancer centers, pediatric hospitals, health plans. HIPAA-aware architecture. Patient-safety-critical uptime.

10+

Fortune 500 companies

Apple, United Airlines, Dell, Norfolk Southern, Kohl's, JLL, Iron Mountain, DTE Energy, Harley-Davidson, Zebra Technologies, Echo Global Logistics, and counting.

Vertical specialties

Healthcare. Financial services. Retail. Manufacturing & CPG. Logistics. Technology. Energy. Legal & gov / edu. Media.

How we work

Four principles, written down so we hold ourselves to them.

Engagement after engagement, the same four ideas separate a serious technical partner from a generic provider. We commit to them in writing.

Clarity over complexity: We demystify IT and communicate in concrete terms. We name the tools. We show the dashboards. We send the diagrams. If we cannot explain what we are doing, we are doing it wrong.
Expertise-driven: Every engagement is backed by real architectural experience, not a generalist playbook. We have built the systems we are operating. We are not learning on your environment.
Client-first transparency: No hidden fees, no ambiguous SLAs, no surprise overages. Pricing structure and contract terms are written down. Quarterly reviews show real metrics from real dashboards, with the trend line and the methodology both visible.
Operational rigor: Documentation, monitoring, change management, and incident response are built in from day one, not bolted on when something breaks. Operations is engineering, run with the same review and tooling standards as production code.

Where we are

Naperville, Illinois. Chicago metro and the Midwest.

4th Octet LLC is an Illinois company. We come on-site for discovery, kickoff, and significant change windows; the rest runs remote on the back of the observability platform we build for every client.

Let's talk

Looking for a partner who can talk shop?

Your first call is with an engineer, not a salesperson. Short, candid, free.

We reply within one business day.
Principal engineer on the call, not a sales rep.
No pitch deck. Just questions and answers.

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