About
Small company. Serious networks.
TMNS, Inc. exists so that organizations without a carrier-grade network team can still have carrier-grade network engineering.
TMNS cut its teeth running network operations: firewalls, switches, routers, and VPN tunnels for businesses that needed their networks to just work. Years of watching networks live taught us something most consultants never learn: exactly where designs fail in practice, and why. So we chose to focus on the design and build portions, a clear niche we were uniquely qualified for. In this day and age, when the field is full of generalists, it's best to be the specialist.
The discipline comes from an unusual path. Growing up in rural Minnesota taught us the value of a dollar. Starting out in rural broadband taught us how to squeeze the most out of every piece of gear. Efficiency isn't optional when budgets are thin. Telecom taught us always-on, because 911 and priority traffic meant networks that were simply never allowed to fail. And high-frequency trading taught us speed, where always-on wasn't good enough, and the network also had to deliver maximum performance at the lowest possible latency.
Today it's all rolled together. We specialize in monitoring, automation, and industrial, telecom, and OT networks: frugal, always on, and fast. Exactly what OT and SCADA networking demands.
What has grown is the consulting side. Over the years, TMNS's founder has designed and operated telecom, transit, and industrial networks at carrier and agency scale: the networks behind dial tone and 911, rural broadband, train signaling, traction power SCADA, fare collection, and radio. That world has different rules, and we know them firsthand.
That standard of care (where a change is planned like it matters, because it does) is what TMNS brings to every client. Transit agencies, utilities, industrial operators, and businesses that simply can't afford a network surprise.
We stay deliberately small. A few clients, deep relationships, and work we're proud to sign.
How we work
We join your team. The work is yours.
First, we join your team, as technical consulting, architecture, and automation team members. We do it that way because everything we produce belongs to you: the designs, the documentation, the automation, all of it.
We never engage your employees, your customers, or your vendors as TMNS. We work as you: under your name, inside your organization. It's your network; we're there to provide the assistance it needs and then cleanly hand off. We're the secret behind successful companies, which is why nearly all of our work arrives by word of mouth.
That model works for us, because we like the "fix it" projects, not steady-state operations. Think of hiring a construction company to build or remodel a building: they do the build, and then they leave. They don't operate the building or handle the daily care and feeding. We work the same way.
And one difference from most consultancies: we don't build you what we want to build. We build you what you want us to build.
The standards we hold while we're there
Segmentation first
Control systems and enterprise IT should never share fate. Every design starts from that rule.
Change is deliberate
Blue/green change models and rollback paths: networks designed to be worked on at any time, safely. Boring changes are the goal.
Root cause, always
An incident isn't closed when the alarm clears. It's closed when we know why it happened and it can't happen again.
Documentation survives us
If we disappeared tomorrow, your next engineer could pick up our drawings and runbooks and keep going.
A Minnesota company. Supporting networks anywhere.
TMNS, Inc. is a Minnesota corporation based in Saint Cloud, in the center of the state. Consulting travels well: on site when it matters, remote when it's smarter. Wherever your network runs, we can help.