Bluesmith

Employee ownership is a rarity among IT suppliers, and Bluesmith Information Systems marked its tenth year by moving a majority 75 percent shareholding into an employee ownership trust, so every member of staff benefits from the company's future success. The firm says this culture is why people and clients both stay.

Data warehouses at large scale

Bluesmith describes data as its core competence. It specialises in agile data warehouse design and build, and in bespoke, high-volume transactional systems, especially in retail. As an example of scale it describes a warehouse for a global airline holding 300 billion records, with hundreds of millions of amendments arriving every day from more than 450 data sources.

The company says it can deliver a quick return and also a route to centralised data and master data management without a major rewrite. It claims to have delivered business intelligence value to more than thirty large commercial and government bodies in this way, among them retailers, a university, a media company and an insurer.

Application design and legacy systems

The firm presents itself as skilled in what is now called agile DevOps, and in support, enhancement and cloud conversion of old IT systems in complex, mixed-technology environments. It says it sometimes builds new systems from scratch but is happiest rejuvenating tangled legacy estates and opening up the value in corporate databases. Its team are experts in .NET and SQL Server, with experience in Teradata, NoSQL and Node among other technologies.

The way it works

Bluesmith criticises suppliers that over-promise and under-deliver. In contrast, it says it uses a clear methodology and highly cohesive teams, with no nasty surprises, and that its people upskill clients' in-house teams while tackling problems. Its stated order of priority is simple: the client's success comes first, and the firm's follows.