//it-consulting
Strategic B2B IT & system architecture consulting
Independent, vendor-neutral advice for people who have to make a technology decision and defend it: architecture assessments, technical due diligence, build-versus-buy analysis and modernisation roadmaps.
Consulting engagements here are scoped as written deliverables with a fixed price and a delivery date. You receive a document you can circulate to a board, an auditor or an investor, not a slide deck that only makes sense with us in the room.
We are deliberately not a reseller. We hold no vendor commissions and no partner quotas, which means a recommendation to keep what you have, or to buy a product instead of building one, costs us nothing to give. That independence is the whole value of the service, so it is written into our engagement terms.
Security work is a specific case of this: we review and test only systems that you own or are contractually authorised to have tested, under a signed scope and rules-of-engagement document agreed before any testing begins.
Capabilities
What we build and review
Architecture assessment
A structured read of what you have, against what it has to do next.
- Current-state architecture and dependency mapping
- Scalability, resilience and single-point-of-failure analysis
- Cost drivers in your current infrastructure
- A documented target architecture with a staged path to it
Technical due diligence
For acquisitions, investments and board-level decisions with a deadline.
- Codebase quality, test coverage and maintainability review
- Team capability, key-person risk and delivery practice assessment
- Licence, dependency and open-source compliance review
- A written opinion with severity-ranked findings and evidence
Build, buy or keep
The analysis that decides where the next budget goes.
- Requirements weighted with the people who will use the system
- Market scan of viable products against those requirements
- Total cost of ownership over a realistic horizon, not a launch year
- A recommendation with the case against it stated too
Security review
Contracted testing of systems you own, with reproducible evidence.
- Mobile application review against the OWASP MASVS
- API authentication, authorisation and rate-limiting review
- Secrets management and build-pipeline security review
- GDPR-oriented data-flow mapping for personal data in your systems
How an engagement runs
Fixed deliverables, fixed dates
An advisory engagement is typically two to six weeks from kick-off to a delivered document.
- 01
Framing
We agree the question the engagement answers and what evidence would count as an answer. This is written down, because vague questions produce vague reports.
- 02
Evidence
Interviews, code and infrastructure access, documentation review and, where in scope, hands-on testing under a signed rules-of-engagement document.
- 03
Analysis
Findings ranked by severity and by what they cost you, with the reasoning shown so your own engineers can challenge it.
- 04
Delivery
A written report and a working session with your team. Where useful, a costed roadmap that your people or any other supplier can execute.
Engagement models
Advisory engagement shapes
- Fixed-scope assessment
- One question, one document, one price. The most common shape, and the easiest to approve internally.
- Retained advisory
- An agreed number of days per month for a technical leadership team that wants a second opinion available on demand.
- Delivery oversight
- Independent review of a project being delivered by another supplier, reporting to you rather than to the delivery team.
We do not publish a rate card, because the honest answer depends on scope, duration and the team shape a project needs. Every engagement is priced in a written proposal after a scoping session.
Common questions
- Will you recommend that we hire you to build it?
- Sometimes the honest answer is that you should build in-house, buy a product, or do nothing this year. Advisory engagements are priced to stand alone precisely so that recommendation stays free to make.
- Do you resell software or hardware?
- No. We hold no vendor commissions or partner quotas, and we do not sell third-party software licences or subscriptions.
- Can you test systems we do not own?
- No. We test only systems you own or are contractually authorised to have tested, and we require that authorisation in writing before any testing begins.
- Who sees the report?
- You do. Reports are confidential to your organisation, and we will sign your NDA before the engagement starts if you have one.
Scope of our services
We are a business-to-business engineering company. Here is what we do not do.
We work only with companies and public-sector organisations, under a written contract signed before any work begins. We do not advertise or provide services to private individuals, and we are not affiliated with, and do not act on behalf of, Apple, Google, Microsoft or any other platform vendor.
- Consumer remote technical support, helpdesk or PC / phone "tune-up" services
- Device repair, unlocking, data recovery or password / account recovery
- Resale of third-party software licences, subscriptions or mobile applications
- Any unsolicited contact about a problem detected on your device — we never do this
- Services to private individuals; every engagement is a business-to-business contract
Tell us what you need built.
Send a project brief and a member of the engineering team will reply with questions, an approach and a written proposal.