Bespoke Software Development
Real Commercial Software
Although we always provide a strong strategic input to any relationship, we don't
forget that without the actual software, the strategy is meaningless.
So a major part of our business is to build and support specific products or sub-components
in a wide range of business areas and technical environments.
Practical Experience
We've built software ranging from eCommerce sites to sports
broadcast solutions, from Karaoke production systems
to online information services and from Learning Managment
to Internet Payment Systems - and many others!
We've particular interests in media and text analytic systems, but as you can see
we're very versatile! There are more details on this in our
Technical and Case Studies sections.
Successful projects
The key to success with custom software development is the right combination of
rigour and flexibility. We will almost always start with discussing and understanding
the drivers of the business, the clients for the product and the type of features
which will be required. This will be reflected back as a quite formal document which
will provide a scope for the development in hand.
But the reality is that it’s hard to know what you really need until you and/or your users can see
something working. Because of this we almost always adopt an approach where we will build a version,
get feedback, improve it and so on. This ‘iterative’ style of development is quite popular these days,
but we’ve been doing something like it for over 20 years!
So we think we have a particularly good handle on how to work with clients where
their views on what’s needed may change from week to week. Something that’s very
common with entrepreneurs and small companies...
Of course, some projects cry out for all or part to be managed very formally, with
detailed specifications, firm change control and so on. An example might be systems
dealing with finance such as the Protx Payment system which we developed in 2000.