I'm Ken Hartling. After two decades leading cloud and infrastructure organizations inside large enterprises, I started NovaForge to get back to the work directly — hands-on, for teams that deserve that same rigor at their scale.
For most of my career, I ran the platforms other people built on — cloud, hosting, and infrastructure for organizations measured in the tens of thousands.
Most recently I was Executive Director of Cloud and Hosting at RTX (Raytheon Technologies), where I led the hosting function and drove public and private cloud adoption across the enterprise.
Before that, I held VP and senior director roles at GE Healthcare — leading a 300-plus person global organization and a datacenter strategy spanning the US, France, and China — along with leadership roles at GE Power and GE Digital, Barrick Gold, and Capital One, where I helped govern a large-scale AWS migration and cloud architecture practice.
The throughline was always the same: digital transformation, infrastructure modernization, and the operational discipline to make big systems run quietly and cost less — like the year my team cut major outages by more than half.
After years of running enterprise platforms, I kept noticing the same gap: small organizations and teams face genuinely hard technology decisions, but can't justify a full in-house tech org to make them well. They end up over-sold, over-built, or stuck.
I started NovaForge in 2025 to close that gap — to bring enterprise-grade architecture, delivery discipline, and the infrastructure experience behind them to teams that need it at their scale. Modern web platforms, website modernization, and practical AI workflows: research synthesis, summarization, and the automations that give a small team real leverage.
I take on a small number of clients, done properly — not a volume shop. And I still build — NovaForge makes its own products, like SetTable — so the craft stays sharp.
I right-size the solution to the problem in front of us — not the one on a vendor's slide.
I still architect and ship, using modern AI and automation tooling so a one-person shop can deliver outcomes that used to take a team.
Agile delivery, operational rigor, and results you can see — the same way I ran large organizations, at a scale that fits you.
I take on a few projects a year — but if you're building something in this space, I'm always glad to talk it through. No pitch, just a conversation.