The RED SKY 365 Story

The Name

The name came from a pub. That’s not a metaphor — we were sitting in a bar in New Plymouth after a long day, and someone said “you need to call it something.” Red sky at night, sailor’s delight. We were building something for New Zealand, and the sky out here does turn that colour sometimes. RED SKY 365 stuck.

The backstory is less dramatic but probably more useful if you’re trying to figure out whether to hire us.

The Background

I grew up on a marae in south Taranaki. My whānau didn’t have a lot of money but they had a lot of ingenuity. Fixing things. Building things. Making things work with what you had. That mindset got me into IT in my twenties — not because I was a “tech person” but because I liked solving problems that actually mattered to people.

I spent about twenty years in cloud infrastructure and DevOps. Building the pipes that let other people’s software run. Data centres, then AWS, then Kubernetes, then serverless, then whatever came next. Each cycle faster than the last.

The Problem We Solve

When AI went from research paper to business tool — roughly 2022, 2023 — I noticed something. Most organisations were either ignoring it completely or throwing money at it without understanding what problem they were solving. The consultants who showed up were selling transformation programmes that cost six figures and took eighteen months. The vendors were selling platforms that required a team to run.

What most New Zealand businesses actually needed was someone to sit down with them and have an honest conversation. What do you actually do? Where does time get wasted? What decisions are people making manually that AI could inform? And — crucially — what’s the simplest thing we could build that would actually help?

That’s what RED SKY 365 does. Strategy first, then build if it makes sense. No slide decks about AI maturity models. No eighteen-month roadmaps. Just honest advice about where AI fits for your specific situation, followed by solid execution if you want to go further.

We’re based in Aotearoa and we work with Aotearoa organisations — from corporates figuring out where to start, to iwi and community groups who need tools that actually reflect their values. The products we build (DIG, Kapu-Tī, Social Connect) are all things we built because we couldn’t find anything that did the job for a New Zealand context.

Red sky at night. We’re optimistic, but we’re not naive. AI will change how organisations work — it already is. The question is whether you get ahead of it or get caught flat-footed. We’re here to help with the former.