Our Principles

There has been a mantra in IT for many year - "buy before you build"- reinforcing the belief it is quicker and cheaper to buy a software product than it is to build one specifically for your business. Perhaps it was once but these days - development tools and our developers are very good.

Buying a system is never easy - you need to prioritize your requirements and do a market scan to come up with a short-list of candidates. You then learn about each of the products in your short-list so that you can find the product that best meets your needs. After you've done that you inevitably need to consider how you're going to do the things you need but which the selected system does not provide. You then have to think about how your going to deploy it, how you will change the business, how you will load historic data, how you will test it, who will maintain it, what will you do if it crashes and you lose data etc.

The old thinking denies the huge leaps forward in development tools and deployment platforms. The cloud didn't exist when the "buy before you build " mantra was born but now the cloud is here building a system - and running it for years - turns the old thinking on its head.

We like to focus on our core skills : communication and understanding your business and vision; project planning, architecture and Azure development. By focussing on what we do best we get even better at it and are able to offer our clients great value for money. By the way - just because we focus on Azure development doesn't mean we're stuck in our ways - there are constant innovations that are coming out of Azure and we like to be thinking of new ways to use them.

If we use the cloud cleverly (which of course we will) we don't need to worry about servers crashing or operating systems going our of date. Its all taken care of in the monthly bill you will get from Microsoft. Again, presuming this is done cleverly, this bill will reflect the amount of business you're doing and for a small business you can expect it to be less than $500 / month. As your business grows your bill will also grow - in a predictable way with increased volume normally leading to lower costs per transaction.

If you just want to keep things ticking over then that will be it - you don't need servers or software licenses or an IT department. If the office burns down at least your data is safe.

That's not to say you won't need someone who can keep one eye on things - there will occasionally be an issue that Microsoft can't fix without someone getting into the system (expect once in every several years but of course could happen more often). We would be happy to keep this eye out for you. Also, of course if your business changes you might need to change your systems as well - we hope you will be so happy with the system we develop for you that will want to give us another call when that happens.

Its been shown again and again - when people are in too big a hurry to start building a system - they end up building the wrong thing. We bring decades of system design experience to the table and can combine it with your vision to get - to get an architecture up fast. We will review it with you and then start to build. We will refine the low-level design while we build - by preference getting your input as we go. This way we get the best of both worlds - up-front design with agile delivery. Its called the Unified Process - we didn't think of it but we like to use it.

We like to offer great business value and if we can't we don't want the business. This