We’ve been mastering our capabilities since 2002 by delivering complex software development and integration projects for the Enterprise industry. Now we pass our knowledge and experience to startups in the growth stage and help expedite software development and delivery milestones. We fit both the distinct needs of Enterprise organisations and startups and we know how to onboard fast and integrate with existing client teams.
Engineering Skills
We grow and enhance our engineering expertise with continuous learning
and skills deploying. We encourage our own specialists to
keep up to speed with the latest technological developments.
We specialise in:
Alignment Consultancy
Business and technology go hand in hand and we help our clients
keep a close alignment with their vision and daily technical deliverables.
We can help you with:
Continuous Delivery and DevOps Adoption
From code to production, we automate every step of the build process and environment creation. Our approach to DevOps enables clients to focus on business solutions rather than software processes – from ideation to production. It is as much a cultural approach to engineering as it is a set of practices and is best achieved collaboratively and incrementally. Our capabilities allow clients to:
- Automate the delivery value chain
- Identify and remove friction from delivery processes
- Remove environmental bottlenecks
- Create end-to-end environments in minutes
- Have robust and rigorous configuration management policies
- Define Infrastructure as code
- 100% automate quality control tests
- Incorporate
Scaling Operations
Are you finding it hard to balance existing support, new feature implementation, and scaling your solution to cope with new demand? Our nearshore teams can assist. We help start-ups to scale at the inflexion point where your order book of new customers outstrips the capacity of your permanent staff to support the core platform and business-as-usual activities.
As a UK / nearshore Agile development partner that works specifically with start-ups, we slot seamlessly into your existing teams, structure, and culture to accelerate delivery. Customers like Hive (now part of Centrica), Fintech start-ups, and Harbr (a data commerce platform provider) have used us to:
- Scale platforms through our Architecture and DevOps practices.
- Innovate - creating teams to build new capabilities alongside their core platform.
- Business-as-usual support.
- Add resources (and new teams) to extend delivery capability. We’re flexible with particular strengths in Java, Scala, and Python.
Quality Assurance
We embed Quality Engineers within development teams to ensure everyone thinks carefully about how to design, build and test products. This means understanding the business and functional goals, finding clear and concise expressions of what is required, and verifying that what’s been built fulfils the business need.
Our consultants are experts in automation: it’s the only way to ensure fast feedback to developers, continual improvement, and predictable release cycles. We use different types of testing depending on the requirements for each environment and each project. All of our QAs use BDD tools such as Cucumber and have a programming language such as Java, as well as how to wire their test frameworks into the CICD process.
As innovations, best practices, and tools evolve, it is important for us to share knowledge across teams. We have therefore established QA practice to help everyone benefit from any new learning that happens. This helps our consultants grow but also benefits your projects as new ideas are quickly evaluated and, where useful, applied quickly to existing projects.
AI/ML
We successfully apply AI/ML to solve customer problems in life sciences and finance. Our AI/ML practice has grown from projects in data science in the Financial and Health markets. For example, we have helped underwriters replace expert decision-making using historical claims information. This included NLP analysis of unstructured data to extract key indicators from past claims to assess risk.
One of our largest current projects takes chemical, pharmacokinetic, and medical information to help repurpose existing drugs, establish new therapeutic probabilities and find new patterns in available data. This has involved building pipelines for structured and unstructured big data ingestion, and elaborating search capabilities, ontologies, taxonomies and ML algorithms involving multiple teams, domain experts and customers.
Innovation
Large organisations use us to co-create and build innovations to wow their customers. We thrive in innovation roles, and we’ve been fortunate to deliver exciting projects which prove ideas and bring new products to market. These include:
- Smart Meter solutions – large-scale IoT integration projects to link smart meters with communication hubs, and existing back-end systems.
- Smart Homes – connecting heating, light, sensors and cameras to cloud and mobile devices.
- Amazon Alexa – voice control of cloud systems.
- Artificial Intelligence - replacing expert decision-making for FinTechs and driving insights for Pharmaceuticals.
We apply our Agile culture and nearshore delivery capability to form flexible teams that pivot quickly onto new ideas. Our teams invest in understanding the business proposition and customer value so we stay motivated and proactive.
Data Integration
To find insights from (or to monetise) your data you must first ingest, engineer, process, and integrate it. Our experience with structured and unstructured data pipelines and ontologies helps you make sense of them and derive value from your data.
- Optimise core data platform infrastructures.
- Create data integrations/ingestion pipelines for structured and unstructured sources with efficient data pipeline orchestration.
- Improve Data transformation with technical processes and business logic.
- Increase the Support for Analytics and performance optimisations.
- Build, train, and deploy machine learning (ML) models - AWS Sagemaker excellence.
- Productise Data to create high-value assets.
Expertise
Development
We specialise in core languages (e.g. Java, Scala and Python), but understand that frameworks and technologies evolve. We’re flexible and quick to adapt.
Testing
Quality Engineers typically work within development teams so test automation is part of the Sprint cycle. We seek and propose continuous improvements to how products are defined, built, tested and deployed.
Automation
DevOps is all about repeatability and automation, from building and testing containers, to releasing pipelines, setting up and maintaining environments, and proactively monitoring applications once live.
Infrastructure
We define infrastructure- as- code using, for example, Terraform and Ansible (plus all the scripting, source control, release and monitoring tools) to get environments built quickly and reliably.
Data
We cover the full spectrum of data services - from data ingestion, through ETL, to reporting and visual presentation; we specialise in building cloud-based solutions that collect, manage, and convert raw data into usable information for data scientists and business analysts to consume.
Aligned Strategy and Architecture
We help your technology teams deliver your investors’ goals and meet client commitments through cloud, mobile, and platform strategies. We understand the constant challenges CIOs face in today’s digital enterprise, including responding proactively to business change, driving technical innovation, and scaling capacity to cope with peak demand. Whether reviewing cloud, mobile, or platform strategies the CIO needs to ensure that robust, flexible architecture, strategy and integration will support the business of today as well as the future.
Enterprise Readiness
Start-ups, and especially those building SaaS solutions, tend to focus on their application architecture. However, the customers they are chasing are typically larger enterprises that already manage a number of internal and external systems with hybrid delivery models. Your customers are therefore thinking about (and dealing) with enterprise architecture challenges. If you want to be adopted – often the goal of a start-up – then you need to start thinking now about how you look from your customer’s perspective and consider your own enterprise readiness. If you don’t, you’re either not going to close that large deal (because of integration challenges or incompatibility), or you will end up investing heavily in customising your solution for your first customer and then regret it for each new customer you find.
So, how do you gain some objectivity and assess your enterprise readiness? One of our starting points is to establish your solution’s interactions with candidate reference enterprise architectures. We’ll help you bridge gaps and gain insights into how enterprises will perceive you. You may even find there are a set of NFRs and best practices related to particular industry certifications – e.g. PSS/DCI, HIPAA, GDPR, SOC 2 / ISO 27001.
Customer Onboarding
Onboarding new customers to your platform can be slow and painful. It also distracts your core team from other tasks, such as building new features or defining the next generation of your platform. We often think of blockers as being about technology, but more often it’s about seeing your product from your customers’ perspective.
We’ve seen several start-ups with bright ideas and good quality software fail to think about the barriers they need to overcome to get their solution adopted. It’s particularly hard on those who have invested heavily in chasing that big customer and finally get through the door only to fail security audits, or to have to re-architect a whole suite of APIs so that legacy systems can plug into their solution. It’s costly, frustrating and, for the most part, avoidable.
We’ve found ways to create and automate a generic client onboarding process. We’ve focused on minimising the configuration (and customisation) required for each new customer. This enables lower-skilled or even outsourced teams to get new customers onboard (including data, security, and interfaces) with minimal effort or delay. Streamlining client onboarding not only cuts time and cost but also helps you to get the commercials right for each new customer, setting your new partnership up for success from the outset.
