We didn’t read about this software. We wrote it.

Why we can do this at all

There is a generation of business software — character-mode, xBase, VB6, classic ASP — that is still doing real work and is increasingly unmaintainable. Not because the code is bad. Because the people who understood it have retired.

We didn’t. We were building on those platforms when they were current, which means we are not reverse-engineering an unfamiliar system from the outside. We recognise it. We know which parts are load-bearing, which are scar tissue from a deadline in 1998, and which will quietly break the moment you move them.

What has changed is the economics. Modern tooling makes the mechanical part of this work — reading a large unfamiliar codebase, tracing what calls what, rewriting the parts that must change — dramatically faster than it was even five years ago. Judgement about what should change still comes from having done it before. The combination is why two people can quote a fixed price on a thirty-year-old system and mean it.

Since 1991

In 1991 the founder saw what personal computing workstations were about to do to the economics of a department — and understood equally well how reluctant a business is to take on new ongoing operating expense. That combination has been the shape of the company ever since: practical software that contributes to the bottom line, for small and regional organisations, at a competitive price.

Along the way we noticed something that turned into a service line of its own. A substantial number of businesses still depend on an early client-server technology called Clipper. Almost nobody supports it. We do.

Where we have worked

Deep knowledge accumulated in a handful of industries, through many years of service to clients including Angelica Textile Services and Unified Western Grocers.

Our technology

Business solutions we build typically leverage Microsoft technology, for two unglamorous reasons: it is affordable, and it offers solution longevity — which matters a great deal when you intend to still be supporting something in twenty years. Specialised providers are brought in where plant-floor and office automation require them.