Introduction

Red Dove Consultants Ltd. is a software development and systems integration services company. Though the company was established in 1996, our people have a long track record of delivering successful systems and projects to a wide range of corporate clients, many of them household names.

Principles

We develop systems and deliver projects in line with the following principles:

  • We pay close attention to a system's architecture, so that inevitable change can be accommodated smoothly. Design is important to us! By getting it right, we find that much less time needs to be spent on support and maintenance.
  • We work closely with users and managers in the business, to get an excellent understanding of their processes, objectives and constraints. This enables us to deliver systems which are relevant to the people who must use them every day.
  • We believe in staged delivery - users get working systems early on, and later deliveries add more and more functionality until everything that was planned for is delivered. From the very first delivery, customers start to see business benefits and a return on their investment.
  • We keep abreast of a wide range of technologies, so that we can properly assess how they can be harnessed to our customers' advantage. More often than not, we advocate the use of appropriate technology rather than "bleeding-edge" technology.
  • We aim to win our customers' respect and trust, so that we get a high proportion of repeat business. This keeps our cost of sales low and both we and our customers benefit.
An Invitation

If, from what you've read so far, you think we may be able to help you, please contact us by telephone on +44 (0) 1923 226288 or send an email to  sales@red-dove.com , and we'll arrange to meet you to discuss your requirements. Following this, we usually produce a free-of-charge proposal where we outline our understanding of your requirement, indicate a proposed solution, propose a programme of work and give cost and timescale estimates. If your requirements can be sufficiently well-defined, we can provide a fixed-price quotation.

Technologies

We work with most of the current, mainstream technologies. By doing so, we can usually fit in with our customers' corporate IT platform strategy and don't need to constrain the choice of technology to solve a particular problem. Here's a partial list of the technologies which we work with:
Technology Area
  
Products/Standards
  
Comments
Operating Systems and Environments
   Win32 (including COM, DCOM), Win CE, Java VM, Unix/Linux, embedded/real-time   Much of our work is on the Win32 platform but we also have experience of significant deliveries on the other platforms. We've even written our own small-footprint real-time kernel for embedded systems!
Relational Databases
   Oracle, SQL Server   The corporate standards. Our experience includes not only SQL but also PL/SQL, Pro*C, T-SQL, Db-Lib
Strongly Typed/Compiled Languages
   Java , C#, C++ (Visual C++, Borland C++, GCC), Delphi, Visual Basic/LotusScript, C   Work on Java includes applets, applications, beans (including CORBA-enabled EJBs), servlets. For productivity and scalability, we choose Java and Delphi - but we're equally comfortable on all these platforms.
Scripting/Interpreted Languages
   Python, JavaScript, ASP/VBScript, ASP.NET, AWK, Zope, Perl, Ruby   JavaScript's great advantage is that it is natively supported by the mainstream browsers. Python is the best general-purpose scripting language for developing large systems: we have contributed a logging package to the Python standard library, and also released a hierarchical configuration module. VBScript is fine on an NT server but we prefer to use Javascript/JScript on the client.
Markup Languages
   HTML, CSS, XHTML, XML   We have developed applications which dynamically generate HTML/XHTML, cross-browser(Netscape/IE). Our work with XML includes transformations via XSL/XSLT. We are keeping abreast of the latest developments, e.g. SOAP, XForms
Collaborative Systems
   Lotus Notes, Domino, Exchange/Outlook, IIS   It's hard to describe how productive Notes and Domino can be for certain types of application. We have developed many systems for both Notes client software and browser client software (intranet/Internet). If you are a Microsoft shop, however, we can also provide systems based on IIS, Exchange and Outlook.
Data Warehousing & Business Intelligence
   Impromptu, Powerplay, IRI Express, Essbase, Business Objects   We have a solid understanding of data warehousing, data cleansing and data staging issues. Most of our systems in this area have been developed using Powerplay (cubes fed by SQL Server or Oracle data).
Protocols and hardware interfacing
   TCP/IP and other protocols layered on IP   We have a good understanding of networking and other communication protocols, and of writing device drivers for various hardware devices (including your own custom hardware)
Techniques & Tools
   lexers/parsers, compiler/interpreters, source-level debuggers   We are very familiar with lexical analysis and parsing technologies, including lex/yacc and variants thereof. These techniques have been used in writing custom interpreters, compilers and source-level debuggers.
Other Programming Interfaces
   MFC, ODBC/DAO/RDO/ADO, threading   Much of our work as systems integrators involves integrating desktop applications such as Word, Excel and Access, using COM and Automation, together with various database integration technologies. A lot of the functionality we develop is exposed through COM Automation interfaces. Many applications have been written as multi-threaded network servers.
Design Methods
   OO, Design by Contract, RAD   Object-oriented design is in our blood. Wherever possible, we use the idea of "design by contract" expounded by Bertrand Meyer in his book Object-Oriented Software Construction (Prentice-Hall, 1988). We believe in staged delivery, with stages designed and implemented using RAD techniques.
Midrange systems
   VMS, AS/400   We have solid experience in VAX/VMS development, not that there's much call for it these days! On the AS/400, we understand very well how to get data into and out of it - and we're not talking about ODBC!
Clients

Our staff have worked with many companies in a wide range of industries, developing a wide variety of systems. Below are some brief details of typical recent projects. Please note that in some cases, the need for confidentiality limits what we can disclose on this site.
Client
  
What They Do
  
What We Did (And Are Doing) For Them
Computacenter   The U.K.'s largest reseller of PCs and related products and services   A wide range of developments mostly using Lotus Notes and Domino, but also projects using VB, SQL Server, C++, Java, HTML/CSS/JavaScript and integration of Notes/Domino, AS/400, SAP R/3 and MS Office.
Syntel, Inc.   A large U.S.-based out-tasking service provider   Designed and implemented a multi-tier financial application involving the use of Visual C++, ATL, Oracle,  ADO, Pro*C.
The Performance Management Group   A respected provider of consulting services and software in the domain of Performance Management   Helped to design a new generation of products for intranet deployment.
Group 1   Group 1 provides industry-leading technologies that allow businesses to cleanse and enrich their corporate data, generate personalized customer communications and integrate and deliver data across the enterprise.   Helped to adapt a new generation of products for Internet deployment.
Adecco UK Limited   The world's No. 1 employment services company, with 6,000 offices worldwide.   Designed a range of collaborative software solutions, including some which help with Sarbanes-Oxley compliance.
(more to follow...please watch this space)    

© 2004 Red Dove Consultants Ltd. For more information, please contact sales@red-dove.com

Valid HTML 4.0! Valid CSS!