We are freelance consultants, based in the UK, and have over 15 years' experience consulting in various organisations - ranging from small start-ups to multi-national companies.

What do we do?

We specialise in the performance and tuning of software, databases and web applications. We design and develop new high-performance applications, and we troubleshoot and resolve performance problems with existing systems. We cover all aspects of IT performance, including architecture, applications, and databases, and we have experience with a range of different technologies.

Who have we worked for?

We have worked in the following areas:

  • Telecommunications
  • Government: central banking, payment processing, national statistics
  • Internet Service Providers
  • Postal services
  • Insurance
  • Paper manufacturing
  • Data processing
  • Healthcare
  • Surveillance
  • Investment banking
  • Power generation

What makes us different?

Systems rarely consist of one component running in isolation: even with the most basic applications, there are usually a number of different parts all working together.

Since applications are rarely single components, performance issues cannot always be narrowed down to a single component either. Indeed, many performance problems are in fact quite complex to diagnose, as no one piece of software is at fault, rather it is the combination of multiple components causing problems. This is especially true of complicated multi-tier systems with many different interactions between different processes.

Traditionally, performance consultants have only been able to deal in individual technologies - you may find a database performance and tuning expert, or you may find an application performance expert. We are different because we have experience and skills in every aspect of performance. We can look at systems as a whole: anything from single database queries, to complicated message-passing and asynchronous systems, and can therefore look at performance from all angles.

Click here to see the range of technologies that we cover.

What have we achieved?

Here are some of the more notable performance improvements we have delivered:

  • A traffic route report for a telecommunications company, from 5 days (yes days!) to 5 hours.
  • A trade union subscription calculation application for a data processing company, from 35 to 3.5 hours.
  • A database stored procedure used in the final stage of an e-commerce application, for a postal services organisation, from 45 to 0.5 seconds.
  • A batch load process for a marketing system, from 55 to 2000 numbers/second.

In addition, some applications developed from scratch include:

  • An intra-day tick storage database for replaying index values, which was able to store over 27,000 ticks/second.
  • An embedded web server running on a single x86 processor at 533 MHz, which could support over 4,000 requests/second.

Ethics

Rarely will you ever see consultancy organisations discuss ethics, but this is one area that we feel is as important as the actual service that we provide. All consultancy firms are businesses - they need to make money. But the larger the firm the more pressure on staff to sell further work. Indeed, the consultants at some well-known organisations are promoted based on their ability to bring in extra sales, not on the quality of their technical solutions.

We are proud to be different, and we stand out from other consultancies because:

  • We are a specialist consultancy; we consult in our area of expertise and nothing else. If we do not feel that we do not have the skill or experience for a particular project, we will tell you.
  • We do not supply inexperienced staff at expensive consultancy rates: you will never pay for someone to learn on-the-job at your site.
  • Any documentation that we are asked to produce will contain exactly what you want; they will not become brochures that attempt to sell futher work.
  • We do not deliver labour-intensive solutions that make you reliant on us. Our sole aim is to come in, deliver exactly what you specify, and leave you - dependant on no one. If you want us to do further work, fine; if not, that's fine too.
  • We are the only consultants to offer free analysis, fixed-price quotes, and guarantee results: if we cannot improve the performance of your system by at least 10% - you pay nothing.