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: almost all of our revenue comes from fixed-price projects.

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
Platforms
 Windows (32- and 64-bit), Java SE/Java EE, .NET, Linux/Unix, Android, Adobe Flex/Adobe Air, embedded/real-time, Office, OpenOffice/LibreOffice We have experience of significant deliveries on all these platforms. We've even written our own small-footprint real-time kernel for embedded systems! We develop multi-threaded, multi-process, distributed applications.
Relational Databases
 Oracle, SQL Server, DB2, PostgreSQL, MySQL, iSeries (AS/400) The corporate standards. Our experience includes not only SQL but also PL/SQL, Pro*C, T-SQL and Db-Lib.
Strongly Typed/Compiled Languages
 Java, C#, C++, Delphi, C Work on Java includes applets, Swing applications, and the full JEE stack. For productivity and scalability, we choose Java and Delphi - but we're equally comfortable on all these platforms.
Scripting/Interpreted Languages
 Python, JavaScript, ActionScript, ASP/VBScript, ASP.NET, AWK, 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.
Web Applications
 HTML/XHTML, CSS, AJAX, ASP.NET, Django We have developed applications using common AJAX libraries such as Ext JS, jQuery, YUI and others.
Collaborative Systems
 Lotus Notes, Domino, Exchange/Outlook, SharePoint 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 ASP.NET, SharePoint, Exchange and Outlook.
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 customers' 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.
Data Analysis & Visualisation
(Popularised these days under the umbrella term of "Big Data") 		We have strong mathematical and problem-solving skills which we have used to good effect across many industries. We use the highly-regarded ecosystem for numerical and scientific analysis which exists around the Python language - for example, NumPy, SciPy, matplotlib, Pandas, the Qt framework for desktop visualisation and a range of JavaScript libraries for browser-based visualisation needs.
Design Methods
 OO, Design by Contract, RAD/Agile methodologies 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 and Agile methodologies.
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
Examples of what we did (and are doing) for them
Computacenter Europe's largest reseller of PCs and related products and infrastructure services A wide range of developments mostly using Lotus Notes and Domino, but also projects using ASP.NET, SQL Server, C++, HTML/CSS/JavaScript and integration of Notes/Domino, iSeries, 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 (Pitney Bowes) 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 SOX (Sarbanes-Oxley) compliance.
Earl's Court & Olympia Limited Perhaps the UK's best known conference hosting company. Performed a quality review on software developed by an offshore provider, adding significant value to the quality of software provided.
(more to follow...please watch this space)
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