Engagements
You should know exactly where the work stands.
An engagement with us runs through nine recorded stages. Each one has to be reached deliberately, and four of them will not open without a document behind them.
Why this page exists
Most infrastructure relationships are opaque from the outside. You sign something, then wait, and progress is whatever the last email said it was.
Ours is a state machine with your name on it. The engagement sits at one stage at a time, it advances exactly one stage at a time, and the transitions that matter refuse to happen without the signed artifact that justifies them. That is not a reporting layer bolted on afterwards — it is how the work is allowed to proceed at all.
The nine stages
From first conversation to running operations.
Qualification
We work out whether this is work we should take on. What outcome you need, which constraints are real, and whether we are the right people for it. If we are not, you hear that here rather than three months in.
Assessment
A focused review of the environment: the recurring work, the risks, the constraints, and the outcome behind the request. You come out of it with concrete findings and a prioritised path, whether or not you go further with us.
NDA
Before you show us anything you would not put in an ordinary email, a mutual non-disclosure agreement is put in place and signed. Nothing confidential moves before that exists.
Confidential discovery
Gated · Requires a recorded NDA signature
With the NDA in place we look at the material we could not look at before — topology, incident history, existing contracts, the things that decide whether a design is real rather than plausible.
Statement of work
We write down what will be delivered, by whom, against what definition of done, and what is explicitly out of scope. It is specific enough to argue with, which is the point of writing it down.
Signature evidence
Gated · Requires a recorded SOW approval
The statement of work is approved on your side and that approval is recorded against the engagement as an artifact. We do not move forward on a verbal yes that nobody can produce later.
Quote and billing
Gated · Requires a recorded SOW signature
Commercial terms are issued and billing is set up against the scope that was actually signed, rather than a scope that quietly drifted between the conversation and the invoice.
Provisioning
Gated · Requires BOTH billing readiness AND capacity confirmation
Infrastructure is built and your engagement lands on real, owned hardware. It cannot start until two separate things are true: billing is ready, and we have confirmed we have the capacity to run what you asked for properly.
Assurance
The engagement moves into continuing operations — monitoring, reporting, incident response, and the evidence that what was promised is what is running. The record of how you got here stays with the engagement.
Evidence, not assertions
Four of those nine transitions are gated on an artifact. Not on someone remembering to check — on the artifact existing.
Confidential discovery will not open without a recorded NDA signature. Signature evidence will not open without a recorded approval of the statement of work. Quote and billing will not open without a signed statement of work. Provisioning will not open without both billing readiness and a recorded capacity confirmation.
If the document is not there, the engagement does not move. That protects you as much as it protects us: nobody can claim a stage was reached, and nobody has to reconstruct months later who agreed to what.
THE PROVISIONING GATE
We will not start provisioning until it is both paid and proven to fit.
Provisioning is the stage where your work actually lands on finite hardware that we own. Payment answers one question. It does not answer the other one: will it fit?
That second question is not a quota ticket here. Getting it wrong means a purchase order, rack space, and a trip to the datacentre, with lead time measured in weeks. So we make the sizing judgement before we commit to a date, and we record it as an artifact against your engagement rather than leaving it as something an engineer was supposed to ask about.
Buying capacity from a self-serve console inverts this. You can pay first and find out afterwards what was actually available. We would rather give you an honest lead time than a start date we cannot hold.
Paperwork
Signed and retained.
Signed where we can account for it
Documents in an engagement are signed through our own signing service at signing.devatnet.com. The signature is part of the engagement record, not an attachment somebody has to go and find.
Retained against the engagement
Signed documents are retained and referenced by the stage they unlocked, so the artifact behind any gate can be produced later without an archaeology exercise through inboxes.
One stage at a time
The workflow advances exactly one stage per transition. Nothing is skipped to keep a schedule, which means the sequence you read above is the sequence that happened.
No sign-up button
There is nothing on this page that creates an engagement, and that is deliberate.
An engagement is opened by a person, after a conversation, once the commercials are settled and we know what is going to land on our hardware. There is no trial, no instant provisioning, and no account you can create at two in the morning that quietly reserves capacity we have not checked. You ask; we answer; a human decides. If that is slower than a credit-card form, it is slower in the part of the process where being wrong is expensive.
Start at stage one
Bring us the environment and the constraint. We'll tell you honestly whether we are the right people.
Already an engagement with us?
Existing customers can sign in to see the current stage, the transitions recorded against it, and the documents behind each gate.