Principal & Architect
J.B. Zimmerman
JZ
With over 25 years in the SaaS ecosystem, J.B. Zimmerman has operated at every layer of the SaaS stack from physical datacenter architecture to high-level cloud application design. As the Principal of Ronin7 he serves as a specialized advisor for Private Equity firms, M&A teams, and CTOs facing critical scaling or reliability hurdles.
J.B. has been causing havoc with computers since acquiring his first Apple ][+ at the age of 13 and promptly teaching himself 6502 assembly language in order to write a 1-bit digital audio recorder, editor and player using the machine's cassette data input port and speaker. His first career was as a military analyst, working with Charles Stark Draper Labs and as a RAND corporation researcher, before shifting to internet systems in 1998.
He has worked as a systems administrator, a network administrator, an Op, a DevOp, an SRE, an architect, a lead, a manager, and a director. His responsibilities have run the gamut from a single recalcitrant application stack to a 60+ person engineering organization responsible for everything from infrastructure automation to security engineering and central architecture support.
In his spare time J.B. flies airplanes, writes fiction both static and interactive, and has too many fountain pens.
Planning and implementation of new platform offerings and refactoring. Design of SaaS system infrastructure. Experience with zero-downtime state-line migrations.
Deep-dive assessments for acquisitions. Identifying key knowledge and operational liabilities, technical debt, and evaluating team capabilities vs. business objectives.
Aggressive cloud cost reduction without performance compromise. Implementing governance that aligns engineering spend with unit economics.
Experience revitalizing, building and rightsizing platform engineering teams to maximize return and velocity.
Successful SaaS systems must converge on a core set of non-functional requirements. The 4R framework focuses on the foundational needs that begin at the base of the stack.
Systems must perform their designed function to a degree of reliability that discourages any question of stability. Performance is measured against specific business criticality.
Architecture must adjust to a non-static world. We balance situational coverage and complexity to ensure technical resilience matches the business's strategic needs.
Designed for reconstitution, systems must avoid "unicorn" requirements. All resources needed to restore service must be available outside of regional or instance-based disaster areas.
Efficiency is driven by the ability to instantiate multiple identical platform instances—whether for testing parity, geographic regional expansion, or dedicated client environments.
4R is a method of using these principles to evaluate a SaaS system, from infrastructure through application stack. It can be used for a static evaluation via an opinionated application, as well as over time to manage change risk.