Our core skills are in technical architecture, specifically Infrastructure Architecture, Solution Architecture and more recently Enterprise Architecture.

We regularly work on world-wide, national, large and medium sized programmes as part of the core architecture team. We work along side the technical and non-technical management, the customer and on-site engineers and trusted vendor consultants.

We are experienced in conducting independent reviews of existing customer systems, producing business cases in the £5M-£20M range; providing guidance and advice on industry good practice; Identifying performance bottlenecks and re-designing existing solutions to remove these bottlenecks; Producing high-level designs from business requirements; supporting the creation of low level designs or supporting the engineers implementing the designs or supporting bids for new work.

Our customers include Government and Defence programmes, household names and blue chip companies. We have sound relationships with key industry vendors such as HP, IBM, Cisco, Palo Alto, VMWare and Symantec.

Here's a number of our recent engagements :

• Data centre migrations for two customers
• Large scale technology refresh and legacy technology consolidation programmes
• Production of an accelerated Base point Architecture for a household name. This involved reverse-engineering from scratch, the existing business's IT systems, to identify the inputs, outputs, interconnects, core functionality and inter-dependencies both for human and system actors. This was the first phase for the business's introduction to the TOGAF Enterprise Architecture framework.
• Independent investment case reviews
• Re-engineering an under performing, high-volume, high-capacity Oracle based data tier and highly reliable SAN based storage tier with raw capacity of around 1PB
• Deploying a consistent, secure and fast Backup, recovery and archive solutions across a multi vendor SAN solution supporting an Oracle database platform, Windows, Linux and Mid-range IBM pSeries platforms.
• Creation and governance of corporate IT standards and road map, to ensure compliance of IT projects with the businesses strategy.
• Providing a trusted and unbiased viewpoint to senior management on evolving technologies.
• Produced an extranet framework for a defence customer that provides a common infrastructure and monitoring environment for a number of logically separate, but often interconnected web sites. The solution maintains security and limits the effect of any security risks in the associated sites.
• Secure out of band management solutions to allow mobile system administrators to access the appropriate management interfaces of systems in a flexible yet secure manner, whilst removing access to other staff members. This utilised IPSEC, PKI and centralised AD group policies to provide centralised management, robust audit trails and secure yet transparent access to those who use the solution.
• Provision of centralised Monitoring and management tools to allow faults to be detected earlier, hence increasing system availability and therefore reducing penalty payments
• Deployment of PKI certificate infrastructures along with their policies and procedures.
• Working with consultancy companies within their bid teams, or within their bid review teams prior to submission.
• Active Directory standardisation, custom schema extension and role based access control, leading into identity management and lower administrative overheads.
• Internet facing content management solutions using Linux or Windows platforms.
• Various network designs, system designs, and e-commerce implementations.
• A number of security related solutions and reviews of existing solutions.
• A global IT infrastructure deployment and management for a banking consultancy company.
• Flexible and extensible naming schemas

Our technical skills are both broad and deep in many areas. Examples include :

• Designing and building secure, manageable and resilient systems.
• Disaster recovery planning and infrastructure resilience.
• Data centre design.
• Various Virtualisation technologies such as :
  VMWare ESX; Hyper-V; client virtualisation; storage virtualisation; network virtualisation; IBM pSeries virtualisation; firewall virtualisation.
• Network technologies
  LAN, WAN, IP, load balancers, firewalls, SSL and IPSEC VPN's using products from vendors such as Cisco, Palo Alto, Checkpoint and F5 systems.
• Storage area networks utilising Enterprise and mid-range products.
  Disk : IBM DS8300, Hitachi 9980V, NetApp cDot and 7 mode NAS and rebadged IBM N series NAS,
  Fabric : Cisco MDS and Brocade fabric devices, using FC or iSCSI protocols
  Tape : IBM TS3500, Quantum i2K, various modular libraries 
  Software : Symantec NetBackup 7.x and 6.x and Enterprise Vault.
• Microsoft technologies
  Robust Windows 2012 through NT3.51 covering core components (AD, policies, security, multiple domains consilidations, etc),
  Terminal Services, SharePoint (MOSS), Exchange, IIS
• Linux and open-source products (RedHat, Centos, Debian, etc)
• Good IT security skills across many technologies.

Since technology and architectural methodologies are constantly evolving, we are happy to engage on other technologies or different approaches, so if you don't see what you are looking for, then please contact-us to see if we can help.

For a view from previous customers, please see our Linked-in page.