Software development and support service based in London, Melbourne and the North of England that specialises in building and supporting bespoke high performance 24x7 business critical applications.Emphasis on exceeding expectations in quality, timescales, risk aversion and performance.Software consultancy, mobile application development, comprehensive database design and management.

Design, development and support of the core EXTRA ticket reservation system of National Express Ltd. 24x7 support, consultancy and management of this critical system that is at the core of the business.The Extra system is designed for performance, 24x7 stability and massive simultaneous use; under our stewardship, constant vigilance and rapid issue resolution the system has enjoyed a down time of less than 1 hour in 13 years of operation.

Technical Consultant

United Parcel Service required a C / C++ and UNIX shell specialist to prepare their systems for the new delivery service advertised Autumn 1996, and to maintain TCP/IP and UUCP data transmission links between large quantity shippers such as Dell and Gateway.Preparation included year 2000 issues, performance improvements in pre-processing, database processing (Informix SQL) and post processing to allow a much higher volume of data to be processed and with greater accuracy and confidence.Team leadership skills were required in this role as well as communication skills in translating technical issues from computer jargon to English that enabled a good company wide understanding of what the system was up to.

High end UNIX and C programming knowledge was required to re-write a passenger journey construction system for BA’s analysis of their market. The system was to integrate with travel agency computer systems tracking segments of booked and part booked journeys.A complex algorithm was developed by myself and market strategists at BA to calculate passenger journeys from each flight segment booked through one or more travel agencies - Up to 40 Million flight segments are now processed monthly through the system. Another role at BA was to aid other contractors and permanent staff in efficient C coding and ANSI standards.Due to internal budgets the system was developed to be platform independent of both IBM Mainframe and UNIX systems, this was to enable transfer from Mainframe to UNIX in the next budget term - This was achieved incorporating over 300,000 lines of code.The system was estimated to have regained BA over £15,000,000 of revenue in only the first year of operation.

Maintenance of stored procedures in Sybase, implementing Sybase 10 SQL cursor processing to increase processing performance.Responsible for international data interface links with a central Sybase database, including liaison with foreign distributors to ensure that data from their systems is acceptable to the Walt Disney Sybase system. Advanced skills in Shell / UNIX / C and C++ also proved valuable to the role.

Responsible for ensuring the BT Work Management System was fully tested and delivered within tight deadlines. The position involved rigorous testing of software written in C and C++ running on an Oracle database, extensive use of SQL was involved as well as the design and coding of bespoke system test software written in C, C++ and AWK on a SUN/HP Unix platform. Other intensive duties were ensuring that the test teams Unix shell environment was correct. Programming involved extensive use of the SMTP and Berkeley Sockets libraries.

Maintenance and management of a large bespoke database system.C Programming, design and documentation on a SunOS/SOLARIS UNIX platform. System administration of SCO UNIX systems and user environments involving NFS network administration. Use of purify, make, SCCS and the Curses and Forms C libraries.

Data manipulation and demographic analysis via bespoke systems written in C/C++ on both SCOand Sun Unix systems. Extensive use of Unix shell scripting was also important here.SDM was the market leader in the UK at this time for data and demographic analysis, spearheading new technology in the field of direct marketing and pinpoint selection using demographic data sources. Clients included The AA, National Geographic, major banks and building societies as well as charitable organisations such as Oxfam and the Red Cross.