IPTREK is a small specialist practice in Beirut, working with banks, financial institutions and enterprises that run their own IT departments and outsource specific expertise rather than whole functions.
The niche is deliberate: systems deployed on-premises, integrated properly, and handed over to your own staff — built on open-source platforms wherever the right tool for the job is one. We are not a reseller and we are not a managed-service provider trying to own your infrastructure. You keep control; we bring the expertise you do not employ full time.
What we believe
On-premises first. Open source is how we get there
Everything we deploy runs on infrastructure you own or control. That is the requirement we design around, and it does not move.
Open source is how we meet it, not a creed. Software you can read, build and run without asking anyone’s permission is the most dependable way to hand you that control, so it is what we reach for first. Where the right tool for the job is proprietary we say so and work with it — we administer Microsoft SQL Server alongside PostgreSQL and MariaDB, and we name every paid component in the scope. What we will not do is let a licence decide where your data lives.
Being precise about what that protects matters more than the slogan. A licence granted on code already released cannot be withdrawn, so a platform you are running today cannot be taken from you. A roadmap is a different matter: projects change hands, and features can move into a paid edition. We have seen it happen to a platform we carried, and we changed what we recommend rather than defend a choice that had stopped being right. That is the argument for controlling the infrastructure: when the upstream changes, it becomes a question about your next upgrade rather than about your Monday morning.
The client should be able to fire us
We train your staff, document the configuration and deploy software you can maintain without us. Some suppliers regard that as commercially unwise. We regard it as the only honest way to sell expertise to an organisation that has its own IT department.
Integration is where the value is
Any competent engineer can install a monitoring platform. The difficulty, and the value, is in the joins — alerts becoming tracked tickets, tickets linked to assets, work visible against governance. That is what turns several tools into one estate.
A backup that has not been restored is a belief
It generalises: a cluster that has never failed over, a DR plan that has never been exercised, a certificate inventory nobody has checked. The control is not the configuration, it is the test.
How we work
Every engagement follows the same five stages, whether it is a two-week certificate project or a platform rollout across a branch network. The depth changes; the sequence does not. Where project governance is in scope, this is itself run the PRINCE2 Agile way — it would be difficult to recommend a method we did not use ourselves.
Assess and scope
We look at what you actually have — the estate, the current tooling, the constraints and the obligations you are working under. The output is a written scope with the unknowns identified, not hidden.
Install and configure
Deployment on your infrastructure, hardened, integrated with your directory, and configured to your process rather than left at vendor defaults.
Integrate
The connections between systems — directory, monitoring, ticketing, delivery tooling and databases — built and tested so the estate behaves as one system.
Train and hand over
Your people trained on the system as configured, with documentation, so operation does not depend on us or on one internal expert.
Support
An agreed support arrangement if you want one. Not required for the system to keep running — the software is open source and the deployment is yours.
The same method covers a departmental pilot and a multi-site rollout — what changes is the control level, not the sequence. The most common mistake we see is a small project governed like a large one, which produces overhead nobody sustains.
What we ask of you
Engagements go well when a few things are true on your side, and it is fairer to say so up front than to discover them at week three.
- A named person with the authority to make decisions, not only to relay them.
- Access to the environment early enough that assessment is based on the estate rather than on a description of it.
- Honesty about existing constraints — the undocumented system, the server nobody will reboot, the process everyone routes around. We will find them anyway; finding them early is cheaper.
- Availability of the staff who will operate the system, during handover rather than after it.