consulting

Many businesses face challenges which they are ill-equipped to meet. Often someone from outside can see, with more clarity, the best way forward.

We offer independent advice to businesses and organisations covering a wide spectrum of activity. Assignments are tailored to particular needs and circumstances. Examples of the sort of assignments undertaken are:

• Project management - in financial services; retail; property construction and management; education; and leisure
• ICT Systems integration with business processes
• Virtual Private Networking to provide centralised file and print servers with sophisticated automatic back-up to a remote location
• Website development - intranets/extranets, database-driven sites, brochureware
• Financial management and restructuring to transform a business in difficulty

Our services are described below. Please feel free to call or email us for further information.

business planning

When conducting a business review, our absolute priority is to understand your aspirations as well as your needs; everything we do thereafter is guided by that understanding.

We favour, wherever possible, incremental changes which provide an immediate payback rather than large scale, sweeping change with all its attendant risks. The resulting plans offer a comfortable route to achieving your objectives.

software migration

We use open source software ourselves and have replaced various flavours of Windows, MacOS9 and OSX. Specifically, we run Debian GNU/Linux on servers and workstations which provides a number of benefits:

• a stable and robust operating environment to run a wide variety of applications on all sorts of hardware
• immediate access to a over 15,000 software packages ranging from the highly acclaimed OpenOffice suite (which is fully interoperable with MS Office documents and file formats) to web-browsers and email packages which, properly configured, are much less susceptible to malicious attack
• high quality documentation and comprehensive support from the global Debian community
• cost savings - no license fees - much longer hardware replacement cycles - reduced downtime
• greater control and transparency

To enjoy these benefits requires either an understanding of Linux in general and Debian in particular, or help from someone who can provide you with comprehensive support. Having achieved all these advantages for ourselves, we are keen to help others and promote free software.

project management

Our involvement may be limited to advising you whilst guiding the project team, or can entail managing the entire project to completion.

A clear understanding of the expected outcome is a pre-requisite for a successful project. We help you develop those expectations into a clear coherent plan with targets and milestones to measure success. The aim is to provide benefits throughout the course of the project.

Getting key people involved in your project is essential and we help create the project team using your staff where appropriate, and recruiting specialist skills from outside your organisation if necessary.

Ongoing monitoring of the project is needed to measure outcomes and react to changing circumstances.

We have many years of experience in solving problems and exploiting opportunities - it's what we enjoy doing.

networking and systems integration

We can help you with

• Cross platform networking (sharing files and services between Windows, Macintosh and Linux based PCs)
• Broadband installation and management (including, where necessary, Virtual Private Networks to provide secure shared access to files and services from remote locations)
• Systems specification and implementation
• Security (threats from viruses, malware and other hostile attacks continue to grow)

Our help isn't limited to setting up systems; we continue to provide ongoing support. In addition to telephone and email support, we conduct the maintainance of Debian systems remotely, via a secure connection. This means that system updates and security patches are installed promptly and at relatively low cost. We also monitor the systems and routines such as the automatic backups, remotely.

web development

We deliver tailored solutions to meet your needs, from "brochureware" for relationship driven businesses which typically need a web presence to reinforce their professional image, to content management systems or database driven sites where information changes regularly and may need to be updated by different "non-technical" people.

We can also help to develop your Intranet (in effect a private website used to communicate with staff, customers or suppliers)