Jaime Solari built for the work beyond the demo

An acquisition announcement is a peculiar place to look for a person's working philosophy. Everyone has dressed their ambitions for the occasion. Yet when Jaime Solari spoke about Oktana joining Argano in October 2026, his emphasis was revealing: the engineering culture his team had built, and the practical uses to which it could be put. There was a bigger company in the picture. The work still occupied the foreground.

Argano announced its acquisition of Oktana on October 13. For Solari, Oktana's co-founder and CEO, the transaction opens another chapter in a career that has included a software engineering job, IBM, and more than one turn at founding a business. Enterprise software has supplied the continuity. The setting and scale have changed.

His stated ambition for the combination was straightforward: a wider audience for the team's expertise. In a business fond of announcing the future before anyone has tested the login screen, there is something appealing about a founder talking about what his colleagues can actually deliver.

A career with several beginnings

Solari's career begins well before Oktana's founding in 2014. His professional history includes a software engineer position at Starlab in 1999, followed by co-founding InMeeting.com in 2000. He then worked in IBM's Software Group product development organization from 2001 to 2006, and in its CIO organization from 2006 to 2008.

Those titles describe two useful vantage points on enterprise technology: developing software and working inside the organization responsible for a company's own information systems. They make a fitting prelude to a business built around helping other organizations get their technology to cooperate. A system can look impeccable in a presentation and still be awkward company on a working Tuesday.

Between 2008 and 2013, Solari was a co-founder at Timba Software / Altimetrik. Oktana followed in 2014. His educational background includes the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which he lists on his professional profile. The career's sequence is more interesting than a tidy ascent: an early venture, a large technology company, another founding role, and then the business he would lead for more than a decade.

Silver opened a door

In March 2019, Oktana announced that it had become a Salesforce Silver Consulting Partner. Solari was identified then as the company's president. His response focused on the doors the distinction might open: different sectors, different industries, and opportunities for the team.

He described it as something Oktana had worked hard to achieve. The announcement also thanked the partners who had helped the company grow. Even in the conventional language of a business milestone, the emphasis was collective. A consulting firm's reputation travels with the people assigned to a project; the founder cannot personally attend every meeting, however heroic the calendar.

Read as a moment in Solari's career, Silver marks the consolidation of his latest venture inside a larger technology ecosystem. It gave the company another way to demonstrate its capabilities to prospective customers. Recognition had a practical purpose: more kinds of work, with more kinds of organizations.

The certificates had to travel with the skills

By February 2022, Oktana had reached Salesforce Summit Partner status, the tier previously called Platinum. Solari connected that recognition to the team's way of working, emphasizing collaboration and continued development. He also pointed to the variety of technologies encountered while working with high tech companies.

“our values of collaboration, growth and authenticity”

Jaime Solari, on reaching Summit status, 2022

The company's March 2022 account of its progress makes the mechanism visible. It described more than 450 Salesforce certifications and over 700 completed projects using Salesforce technologies. Training and certification opportunities were available from the first day. Developers worked alongside testers, designers, project managers, analysts, and architects.

That mix matters. Consulting is often discussed as if it were a supply of interchangeable programmers. Oktana's description is closer to an ensemble: different disciplines working toward the same release. The coding is essential, but so are the decisions about what to build, how to test it, and how the finished thing will be used.

The Salesforce Navigator recognition covered Customer 360 Platform and Experience Cloud at Expert level. Its assessment joined knowledge, delivery experience, and customer satisfaction. For Solari's company, qualifications and completed work were being evaluated together. An examination certificate could help open the door; the project still had to justify the invitation.

The map included Appalachia

Solari's business also developed a particular geography. Oktana's team spans Latin America and the United States. Its expansion into U.S. delivery in 2020 included a team in Appalachia, based in West Virginia. A company accustomed to finding engineering talent across Latin America was applying its opportunity mission to another region.

The company's social responsibility commitments describe standardized roles and levels of seniority, recruitment through universities and local organizations, and participation in the Salesforce Talent Alliance. These are organizational choices, rather than personal anecdotes about the CEO. They help explain the kind of institution being built during his tenure.

There is a business argument here as well as a social one. A consultancy needs people who can acquire specialized skills and keep them current. Building paths into that work can expand the pool of possible colleagues. Solari's story makes room for the quieter infrastructure of a technology company: recruitment, training, and opportunities that exist somewhere outside the familiar industry addresses.

A programmer's affection for room to build

One of Solari's clearest statements about technology arrived in a June 2025 Heroku announcement. Heroku named Oktana among its Lighthouse Partners, firms contributing experience and feedback as the platform expanded its partner program. Solari singled out Heroku's programming philosophy.

“We've always embraced the pro-code ethos of Heroku”

Jaime Solari, June 2025

His explanation was that it let a Salesforce consulting partner extend what Salesforce could do. That is a compact statement of a builder's preference. A platform supplies useful foundations; code gives a team room to meet requirements that extend beyond the standard configuration.

The distinction helps explain the breadth of Oktana's work. Its services include custom applications, integrations, and ongoing engineering support. Heroku's account placed Oktana among consultancies connecting configurable systems with custom development. There is no need to make a grand theory of the preference. Solari had worked in software development, and here he was defending the freedom to develop software.

Bring the architects. Remember the alfajores.

Then there is the business of meeting people. For Dreamforce 2022, Oktana arranged a meeting space at Mindspace on Market Street in San Francisco, near the Moscone Center. Solari was on the attending team, alongside co-founder Marcos Solari and sales colleagues.

The preparations were wonderfully specific. Visitors were offered coffee, tea, sweets, custom knit socks, and webcam covers. The team also planned dozens of freshly baked alfajores to share its South American culture. Enterprise integration is a demanding subject. A biscuit is a sensible diplomatic instrument.

The detail gives the professional story some texture without requiring a mythology about its founder. Here was a distributed software business arranging a physical place to talk. The sessions and technologies brought everyone to San Francisco; hospitality supplied a reason to sit down.

His own public activity returns to the same practical subjects. In a LinkedIn post about the Databricks Data & AI Summit, Solari opened with a brief declaration: “I love data.” He invited people attending, or simply nearby in San Francisco, to connect. Elsewhere, he shared the team’s lessons on making data flows simpler. It is a modest window onto the working day: technical interests, colleagues’ work, and the continuing effort to get people into the same conversation.

What stays useful after the announcement

Today, Oktana describes a business that has worked with 250 companies and delivered more than 1,000 projects. Its published customer satisfaction score is 4.9 out of 5. It offers project work, optimization, and engineering capacity that can expand with a customer's needs.

Those figures belong to the company and its team. In a profile of Solari, their significance is the accumulated work behind the title. A founder in professional services builds something that other people must be able to carry into a customer's organization. Leadership eventually appears in somebody else's delivery.

Oktana's stated values include curiosity, working together, authenticity, and ownership. They are ambitions that need daily expression: a good question, a well considered solution, a colleague who takes responsibility. The more elaborate the technology becomes, the more ordinary these requirements can sound.

Solari now takes that history into Argano. His public remarks frame the next phase around making technical innovation useful to clients. The test will arrive in the familiar form of projects, colleagues, and customers with specific problems. A customer needs a project to survive the transition from proposal to working system. A colleague needs room to apply what they know and learn what comes next. Those obligations continue through changes in ownership. They also give the next chapter a useful measure: whether the accumulated experience can keep producing work that earns another invitation. The announcement has had its day. There is software to build.