I am an independent consultant, based in the UK. I have over 15 years' experience consulting in various organisations - ranging from small start-ups to multi-national companies.

What do I do?

I specialise in the performance, tuning, and optimisation of IT applications:

  • I develop efficient algorithms, software, databases, protocols, and web applications.
  • I work on new development projects, and well as troubleshooting and resolve performance problems with existing systems.
  • I cover many different aspects of IT performance, including architecture, applications, and databases, and have experience with a range of different technologies.

Who have I worked for?

I have worked for lots of organisations in various sectors:

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

What makes me different?

  • I have worked as a software developer, a database developer, a data architect, and a software architect, so I am in a unique position to be able to pull together skills from various different areas to provide a complete (and often holistic) approach to application performance. Java consultants may be able to help with Java performance, database consultants may be able to help with database performance, but they won't be able to advise on more than one area, nor will they be able to investigate issues with performance due to many different components interacting.
  • I just specialise in performance.

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

What have I achieved?

Here are some of the more notable performance improvements I 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 records/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 on a single processor development system.
  • An embedded web server running on a single processor, which could support over 4,000 requests/second.

Ethics

Rarely will you ever see consultancy organisations discuss ethics, but this is one area that I feel is as important as the actual service that I 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.

I am proud to be different, and I stand out because:

  • I am a specialist consultant, working within my area of expertise. If I do not feel that I have the skill or experience for a particular project, I will tell you.
  • You do not get inexperienced staff at expensive consultancy rates: you will never pay for someone to learn on-the-job at your site.
  • Any documentation that I am asked to produce will contain exactly what you want; it will never become a brochure that attempts to sell futher work.
  • I do not deliver labour-intensive solutions that make you reliant on me. My sole aim is to come in, deliver exactly what you specify, and leave you - dependant on no one. If you want me to do further work, fine; if not, that's fine too.
  • I am the only consultant to offer free analysis, fixed-price quotes, and guaranteed results: if I cannot improve the performance of your system - you pay nothing.