About Us

About HighGear

HighGear is the only visual no-code platform empowering business analysts, managers, and technically creative subject matter experts to rapidly and safely build, manage and integrate enterprise-grade workflow applications. HighGear empowers teams of everyday business users to quickly assign tasks, manage work, track progress, and report the status of activity that flows across dozens of departments in real-time. HighGear provides business unit managers with real-time visibility into the status of operations to dramatically improve efficiency, increase productivity and quickly respond to changing market conditions to accelerate digital transformation. HighGear supports rigorous governance enabling IT departments to easily control authentication and integration while also exceeding the strictest commercial and government security requirements. HighGear is trusted by leading companies worldwide to power mission-critical processes in regulated industries and to surpass critical compliance requirements for customers around the globe.

About the People

HighGear is a technology company, but we do not see ourselves as selling technology. We believe that what we provide to our customers is value, and the technology is simply the medium by which we deliver it. This commitment is reflected in the way we serve our clients. One of the most distinctive and frequent pieces of feedback we received from our clients is that we provide the best support of any software company they have ever dealt with, without exception. This claim may sound like hubris, but it is simply a reflection of the high caliber of people that we attract and retain, and the total commitment to customer success that our culture fosters.

Our History

HighGear was not originally conceived as a product, but as a solution to an internal need. Our founder, Vaughn Thurman, originally developed the concept for a metadata driven application while stuck in an airport in late 2000.  Later, he and our cofounder, Josh Yeager, began reusing that code base and concept for the delivery of various custom applications. At that time Vaughn was running a growing IT services company and needed a solution to help them manage work that was increasingly undergoing audits and regulatory scrutiny.  This solution was originally named JobTraQ and was intended for internal use only. But when clients began to see the high utility and agility of the solution many asked if it could be used in other areas. The secret to its agility was the fact that the platform could easily be configured by non-technical users.

Serious development of that internal application into a releasable product began in earnest after a few early adopters began providing feedback. The application soon earned the attention of organizations like NASA, Beazley Insurance, and others. Large-scale projects that some of our early clients were performing for organizations like Google and Time Life quickly stretched HighGear’s capabilities requiring the system to scale up quickly in order to support hundreds of thousands to millions of work items flowing through the system in real-time. Several years of continued research and development followed, based on the original vision that Vaughn and Josh cast, blended with the feedback from our early adopters in financial services, energy, and government. These sectors benefited from the built-in auditing that HighGear has always provided since its very earliest implementations.

As digital transformation has continued to become increasingly critical to businesses and organizations around the world, the demand for solutions like HighGear has increased quickly. That demand increased even further as the short supply of development talent caused many internal process improvement efforts to fall behind due to lack of human resources. Today, HighGear focuses on solving this supply and demand problem by empowering business analysts and managers to accomplish for themselves what used to require specialized IT skills. What makes us most attractive to medium and large-sized organizations alike is the unique combination of capabilities that both allows business users to granularly and intuitively control the configuration of their areas of the application while IT and information security professionals remain confident and in control of the scalability, supportability, sustainability, and security of the platform as a whole.

A glimpse into our company culture

HighGear is also a pretty fun place to work!

HighGear Family Fun Day at Hershey Park

Team building at the Tech Frederick Games in Baker Park

Watching the Red Sox vs. Orioles game at Fenway Park during our Gear Up: HighGear 2019 Workflow Champions Conference