We're about to rock our world...care to help out with a logo?

Aptillon

We are a group of skilled technical professionals who currently focus on solving business problems for clients utilizing Microsoft SharePoint. We are all well-known in the SharePoint community as teachers, authors, public speakers, and consultants. We hold many of the key certifications and awards offered in our field and while we currently focus on SharePoint, we are software engineers that bring the right tools to bear on a problem to solve it in the best way possible.
We have joined forces to create a company to pool our resources and offer clients an alternative to what has unfortunately become too common in our industry – poorly run projects that fail to meet their business objectives and run massively over-budget. Our approach is based on years of experience which allows us to successfully deliver solutions to meet our client’s needs.

Our target audience is technical decision makers within companies. Our initial entrée into a business is going to be based on the strength of our individual names and reputations within our industry but we want to build out the Aptillon name to stand on its own and carry more weight than we each carry individually.
Our target businesses are those that want to have their projects completed successfully the first time around. They are willing to pay a little more for quality to avoid having to settle for second-rate work that ends up failing and costing them more in the long run. We offer software expertise and business savvy and want clients who recognize and appreciate that fact.

We need a corporate logo that we can build our brand around. We know our messaging, our business and the audience we're targeting; we just need a graphical representation of what we are and where we're going. The colors, tone, presentation and flavor of the logo will drive our print and electronic marketing through our website, marketing glossies, presentations, etc. (so, yes, there is the possibility for additional follow-on work)

For the logo:
No clip art, cartoons, complex photos, pastels or muted colors. We would like a logo that is bright, bold, crisp, clean and uncluttered. The logo should convey strength, authority, built-to-last. Pyramids, mountains, fractal designs, curves and angles are all ideas we’ve kicked around. The logo should work well at multiple sizes and will be primarily used electronically, although it will also be used in print, on shirts and business cards. A transparent background would be preferred to give us flexibility in how and where we use it. If possible we would like to be able to decouple the primary image in the logo from the company name to use the image standalone instead of always including both the company name and image – sort of like how the Nike Swoosh can be used without always having “Nike” with it
We require that the logo be delivered as layered PSD and Illustrator AI files.
UPDATE: We are leaning towards designs that have the company name in all capital letters - primarily because the "i" next to the 2 "l"s is hard to read in lowercase. Please consider this in your designs.