A single virtual microscopy platform
Slides analysed one at a time, and images too large for the tools already in use.
Tailored software development
When it is worth having custom software written and when it is worth buying, told by the people who write it: how long it takes, what it costs, who keeps the code.
Where we have already done it
Electronic invoice management: all in one panel
No customer of the service could see the state of their own invoices, so every question became a support ticket.
VoIP Software: Complete Traffic Management
Voice traffic pulled out by hand into an Excel sheet, with customers going from 400 to 2,000.
When is custom software worth it instead of a market management system?
When your way of working does not fit a market product, and bending it would cost more than writing it. Sometimes nothing needs replacing: if a procedure goes through five programs, an app can call them all. If the process is the same as everyone’s, like accounting or payroll, we tell you to buy.
When we tell you to buy
We are a software house, and we make a living writing software. Buying still costs less. For accounting, payroll, invoicing or a sales CRM there are mature products, already tested by other companies, that cost a fraction of a project and work better than what we could write. They are processes that look alike from one company to the next, and the product needs little adapting. If that is your case, we tell you on the first call.
The three projects above
A telecommunications operator kept its customers’ traffic in an Excel sheet with formulas written by hand. With 400 customers it coped, with 2,000 it did not. We wrote the software that collects the calls from the exchanges and prices them on each customer’s price list: today 500,000 calls a month go through it, from five traffic providers instead of one. For some customers the price list was wrong, and in the software it can be corrected even months later, choosing whether the recalculation should touch calls already priced. The VoIP software case
An electronic invoicing provider received every question about the status of an invoice as a ticket. The panel we wrote in React, on its platform’s APIs, takes that off the support queue: its customers also manage their subscriptions on their own. The electronic invoicing case
A university medicine laboratory acquired tissue images at up to eighty zoom levels, too large for the tools it had, and looked at them one slide at a time. The first attempt failed precisely on the zoom: in the browser it was too heavy, and we had to make it much faster before lecturers and students could work on the same images and share what they see. On top of the platform runs a machine learning model that finds by itself, in those images, the tumour cells of liver and pancreas. The virtual microscopy case
The part people underestimate
Almost no custom project starts from zero, and the part that takes the most time is reading from and writing to the systems already in place: the exchanges, a platform’s APIs, an AS400. At a company with several plants the hard part was finding someone on the client’s side who knew the AS400. We worked closely with that person, and the web app that runs the production lines talks to the AS400 through the APIs we wrote. The production lines case
How it starts
With a call, free of charge. Then a visit to your site, to see how you work today. From there we write a scope split into phases, each with a date, and at the end of each phase the next one is decided on the results of the one just closed.
The phases keep us in check too. We have fallen for a project more than the client did, and pulled it towards goals that were not theirs, in budget or in pace.
What happens if it goes wrong?
Guarantees- The code is yours
- You can stop at any phase
- If something does not work, we fix it
- Maintenance can have guaranteed times
- The project does not rest on one person
Frequently asked questions
Who owns the source code?
Whoever paid for the work. Source, documentation and development environments are your property, and they stay yours even if one day you change supplier.
How long does a project take?
Months, split into phases. Each phase has a date and ends with a system running on real data: looking at that is how you decide what to do in the next phase.
Does it integrate with the ERP we already have?
Yes. For a manufacturing company with several plants, for example, we wrote a web app that runs the production lines and talks to an AS400 through APIs.
How much does custom software cost?
A custom project lasts months and costs tens or hundreds of thousands of euros. The range is wide because the scope and the integrations vary a lot from one company to another, and that is why we go and look at them before giving a number.
How do you choose a supplier of bespoke software?
Ask who will write the code, the people from the first meeting or others; who will own the source at the end; and whether the work is split into phases with a date and a result you can check. More questions to ask are in «The 10 questions to ask a software house».
Does it work for a company with several sites too?
Yes. The hard part is knowing where the identity of whoever logs in comes from. For a company with 1,200 employees and sites around the world, access went through several LDAP directories on different Active Directory instances. In the app we wrote, whoever requests a business trip and whoever approves it do not see the same things.
Who maintains the software after release?
We do, if you want, with a paid agreement for ongoing maintenance, and with guaranteed response times if you need them. Defects in the software we deliver we fix at our own cost, under the legal warranty. If one day you prefer to hand it to another supplier, code and documentation are already yours.
Tell us about the project you have in mind.