Enterprise Systems Consultancy
A second opinion from people who have built these
You have a system, a team and a problem: it is slow, it is fragile, it cannot take the next feature, or you are about to make a big decision about it and want someone outside the building to check the reasoning.
That is what we do here. Our consultants have each spent more than 15 years building and running systems like yours, and we charge for opinions, not for hours in meetings.
Contact usThings we get asked to do
Check a plan
A roadmap, a vendor selection, a build-versus-buy decision. We read it, ask awkward questions and write down what we would change.
Review a design
Before the code is written is the cheapest time to find the problem. We review architectures for scaling, data, failure handling and operability.
Find out why it is slow
Profiling, thread dumps, query plans, broker metrics. Usually the answer is three things, and one of them is embarrassing. We write it up with fixes in priority order.
Adopt something new without regret
Kafka, Cassandra, Kubernetes, a new Java release. We have introduced these into production systems and know what breaks in month two.
Tighten security
Authentication between services, secrets handling, dependency hygiene, audit logging. The unglamorous work that keeps you out of the news.
Technology we know well
Messaging
Kafka, ActiveMQ and Artemis, RabbitMQ, Hazelcast, and the STOMP, XMPP and MQTT protocols. We have run all of them in production and debugged all of them at 2 a.m.
Databases
Cassandra, DynamoDB, TimescaleDB, MongoDB, Oracle, SQL Server, and S3 when that is really what you need. Choosing the right one matters more than tuning the wrong one.
Monitoring
Elasticsearch, Logstash and Kibana for logs; Prometheus and Grafana for metrics. If you cannot see it, you cannot fix it.
Java under load
Deadlocks, thread pool starvation, GC pauses, connection leaks. The problems that only show up at volume, which is when they are most expensive.
APIs
REST with OpenAPI, SOAP with WSDL where the other side insists, JSON and XML. Designing them so they survive version two.
How an engagement works
Usually a fixed-price piece of work with a written result: a review, a performance report, a plan. If you then want us to do the work, that is a separate conversation, and you are free to take the report to someone else.
Write to us with the problem. If you already know you need a team to build something, see enterprise systems development.