It's been a party since 1999

The evolution of DAWA

DAWA Solutions Group was officially formed as Dawa Development, LLC. on August 10, 1999 in Minneapolis by Jeff Zarling as an independent consultant providing website development and application programming services.

He started part-time evenings and weekends in his home office while employed full-time as a programmer-analyst at Graco. He had spent the previous six years at a computer manufacturer, a computer reseller and then as an IT consultant. As a consultant, he was a project lead and project manager for clients including Pillsbury, Imation, and Northwest Airlines among others.

Yearning to take the leap into the business full-time and wanting to raise their kids closer to family, Jeff and his wife Beth moved to Williston, ND in May of 2002 while continuing to focus the business on the builder market in the Twin Cities. Market confusion with the word “development” prompted changing the name to DAWA Solutions Group in 2007.

Continued growth led to moving out of the home office, into the Old Post Office building, hiring employees, and eventually moving into our own office building. Our services expanded beyond websites and software applications to marketing planning, branding, graphic design, and communications as we added more programmers and creative marketing and design professionals.

When the Bakken Oil Boom hit the Williston Basin, DAWA’s name was attributed to over a hundred websites and became a connecting point for business in the region. With an expanding network and the community straining under the sever growing pains, DAWA applied its resources to event production to connect people to do business and solve problems in the region.

DAWA produced the Bakken Investor Conference, Bakken Field Tours, Bakken Housing Summit, and the Bakken Oil Show. Several were only needed for a year or two to make the connections while the Oil Show lasted nine years until the final tradeshow in 2019.

As the Boom faded and the market changed, DAWA changed along with it. Our services morphed into two very distinct divisions with very limited overlap or interaction – creative services (website and graphic design, and marketing and communication services) and software development.

In 2023, DAWA spun out the website design, marketing, and creative services side of the business into a separate partnership called Spruce Row Solutions.

DAWA Solutions Group is solely focused on software development. DAWA provides custom software development as well as FieldWise, an electronic field ticket software platform for oilfield service companies.

We are excited to see how the next chapter of our story is written.